monkeyseekingbirches's Xanga

12 Days of Christmas part 2 (the commercial was part one)

Mon, 24 Dec 2007 18:12:28 GMT

This is the best band you've never heard of, and the best review I've ever read (about their album, "Finally.")

I Point at the Things That I Wish to Command

59 · 14 March 96

Too Much Joy: ...Finally

The list of people whom I will make newly rich when I take over the universe is, as you will probably have deduced if you read this column regularly, long, but there aren't many on it ahead of Too Much Joy. I'm lining up the honors of state, too, for my regime, and one of them is that Too Much Joy will get to write the new National Anthem. I have full confidence that no confirmation hearing will interfere with this appointment. The main reason for this, of course, is that I will be doing away with confirmation hearings in the interest of dictatorial efficiency, but even if I weren't, I think I can explain the rationale for this assignment well enough that I'd have no trouble finding half a dozen or so intelligent humans (and I'm not intimating that any people of this type are currently in government) who would ratify my choice. There is simply no band in the world today with a better grasp of anthem.

Anthems are harder than they might appear, and easier, and more dangerous. The easiest part of an anthem is the music. The point of an anthem is for people to sing it and draw sustenance from the act. For this to work, the anthem has to be easy enough to sing that even people without much singing talent can enjoy the experience instead of concentrating on their vocal inadequacies. The current US anthem is, on this count, a dismal failure, as with the exception of the concluding bit about the land of the free and the home of the brave, it's unnecessarily and unsatisfyingly difficult to perform. If you pick a random person out of a football crowd and shove a microphone in their face, they ought to be able to lead the stadium in a rousing rendition of the national anthem, I believe, or else what's the point of having one? I mean, look how easy it is to fire up a boisterous round of "Happy Birthday"; anybody can sing it, or close enough, and if you look at a crowd of people right when they finish it, they're smiling. The recipient isn't frowning at inaccurate pitches, and the singers aren't wishing they'd rehearsed more beforehand. You can sing it in a monotone and, if you at least catch onto the basic cadences, not ruin the chorus. You can sing it drunk. You can sing it into answering machines. It is durable and forgiving. "The Star-Spangled Banner", by contrast, is best left to trained specialists, and when's the last time you saw anybody smiling during it?

Writing lyrics for anthems is either as easy as the music, or substantially harder, depending on how much sophistication and moral depth you wish to imbue them with. Formally, all you need is something that people will sing spiritedly; "We Will Rock You" / "We Are the Champions" is perhaps the archetypical double-A sided single of the simple approach to anthem librettos. If you're going for something slightly more involved than generic positivism, though (and both Queen songs are the anthem equivalents of those "You've tried the rest, now try the best!" boxes every small-time pizza restaurant has), you've got to find some words that capture something unique about the spirit of whomever it is you're writing the anthem for. On this count "The Star-Spangled Banner" fared much better at the time of its writing, though now that the US is a superpower, not a struggling rebel alliance, most of it is pretty inapplicable and irrelevant.

The really difficult part about writing an anthem with moral and artistic worth (not that many actually try to, mind you) has to do with the very separation between an anthem's music and its lyrics. That is, a musically successful anthem will be rousing almost no matter what its lyrics are (as the chorus of "No Sleep Till Brooklyn", to pick a random example, bears witness), and to the moral anthem writer, this power carries with it the responsibility to apply it truthfully. An anthem that lets immoral people ignore their failings is an artistic and moral offense. An anthem that hides from people the tensions and ambivalences of their situation may well be doing them a disservice. The best anthems, to me, are accurate expressions of shared identity, giving voice to a people's dreams, their history, their vulnerabilities, their caution and their self-awareness. They are communal self-knowledge, not jingoism.

Too Much Joy understand all these things. The easiest part, the music, they ace. They began life as a slightly incompetent novelty act, but they were already moving out of that stage by the time their opening slot on the first Go-Go's reunion tour introduced them to me. Over the course of their three previous major-label albums (1988's Son of Sam I Am, 1991's Cereal Killers and 1992's Mutiny) they've grown into one of the world's most energetic power-pop bands, reeling off infectiously melodic songs thick with Jay Blumenfield's blaring guitar and engaging vocal harmonies behind lead singer Tim Quirk's goofy suburban whine. Simultaneously overeducated and underachieving, with punk's irreverence and immediacy but none of its nihilism or tolerance for sloppiness, they end up something like the Loud Family without so much Joyce and Chilton, an impish Goo Goo Dolls minus the Replacements, the Ramones restaffed with either the cast of Reality Bites or possibly John Stewart and some of his close friends, or maybe a Buzzcocks/They Might Be Giants supergroup. Their shameless puppy-dog charm is rivaled only, in my collection, by the first Posies album, and how anybody could listen to a whole Too Much Joy album and not want to invite them over for a big meal and a long night of inane board games mystifies me.

Lyrically it may initially be tempting to dismiss them as hapless victims of the dreaded band-eating Whale of Excessive Irony. But even songs as obtrusively sophomoric as "Making Fun of Bums" (from Son of Sam I Am), "Long Haired Guys From England" (Cereal Killers) or "Donna Everywhere" (Mutiny) have hints of appealing human vulnerability and sincerity hiding in them, and every once in a while the band even takes a subject seriously, as in the adolescent cruelty of "Pride of Frankenstein", the dispossessed Indian in "Gramatan" (both Cereal Killers), the destruction of history in "What It Is" (Mutiny) or the fine line between loneliness and self-sufficiency in "Stay at Home". And they have what I consider to be one of the greatest pop love songs of all time ("Crush Story", from Cereal Killers, whose tag line "Everything you've ever said is brilliant" captures the mood to which overeducated romantics aspire as well as anything I can think of), and the best party-rock stutter since BTO ("Stay at Home", from Mutiny).

The four-year delay leading to ...Finally (and explaining the title) was due to label difficulties, but listening to the album it would be easy to believe that the band took the time off intentionally in order to spend it in self-improvement. They did lose bassist Sandy Smallens in the interim, but in an excellent example of what I mean about their puppy-dog charm, Mutiny producer William Wittman broke down and joined the band to replace him, which also gives them another good background singer, provided that you agree with me that sounding like a wavery Robyn Hitchcock constitutes "good". Wittman's experience with high-gloss pop production (he worked on a couple of Cyndi Lauper records and Patty Smyth's first solo album) is applied judiciously to TMJ's rather rawer arrangements, and keeps them from sounding anything like Green Day without burying them in overdubs. Musically, I thought Cereal Killers was a big improvement on Son of Sam I Am, and that Mutiny was a smaller improvement on Cereal Killers, and ...Finally strikes me as another big jump. Blumenfield's penchant for arena-rock flair is never fully indulged in, but it pushes at the edges of the band's succinct pop songs restlessly, and helps to keep Wittman and drummer Tommy Vinton in the flat-out sprint necessary to prevent him from getting away from them. Quirk is still, objectively speaking, a pretty limited vocalist, but he's getting better, and there's certainly no denying his enthusiasm (and personally I have a high tolerance for whiny singing, anyway). Ideas of what perfect power-pop is like vary widely, but this is very close to mine. The only thing that has kept me from spending all my waking hours these last couple of weeks humming all thirteen of these songs to myself at once is the fact that, well, how would you do that?

The most startling improvement, though, and the thing that to me clearly elevates this album over some of my other Platonic power-pop Forms, like A Boy Named Goo, Serious Fun, Stolen Wishes or Talk Show, is that here I feel no need to apologize for the lyrics. There are surprisingly thoughtful songs on each of the earlier records, but Mutiny to me had more than it's share of throwaway vagueness, and I'd hoped it wouldn't be the start of a trend. No chance; ...Finally is easily the band's most consistently intelligent album. "The Kids Don't Understand" is a heartfelt revision of the standard slacker portrait, showing both how freakish the zeal of their elders seems to the young, and yet how they see, even if only reluctantly, the sympathetic frailties behind it. "Different Galaxies" is a bubblegum explication of interpersonal difficulties in terms of cosmology. "I'm Your Wallet" is bizarrely literal (and insanely catchy). "Skyline" is a clattering and confused paean to urban impersonality.

"You Will" will never become AT&T's corporate theme song, especially given how "Down and out in limousines" pushes on recent PR wounds about the coexistence of exorbitant executive salaries and massive worker-ant layoffs, but it says much more about the tension between technical innovation ("Invisible ray in the palm of my hand") and victory through market domination ("And if we say you will, you will.") than anything Whitney Houston will ever sing. "How you been faxed at the beach?" they ask. "Have you ever wanted this?" The irony about dehumanization, 1984 notwithstanding, is how readily people either adapt to change, or conveniently forget how things used to be, and the tagline "You will, and you will not be scared" summarizes this pretty concisely.

The strange non sequiturs about draining Lagunita and a pond called Lake Lake would keep "You Will" from being a truly great AT&T anthem, even in an honest world, but there are four songs here that are almost perfect embodiments of the virtues in my conception of an anthem. The most obvious of these is "I Believe in Something", which sounds explicitly generic, but is actually very specific, as the vagueness is not in the song, but in the mind of the narrator. He wants to believe, he has the impulse to faith, but nothing worthy presents itself. "If I was God, no one would doubt it / We wouldn't need church to get / The mystery". The persistent fear that there is no force for good is balanced perfectly against the stubborn insistence that there must be, and frustration that it is so little in evidence, making an anthem simultaneously of moral relativism and against it (which is, to me, the only sensible non-position to take on the issue).

Almost as obvious an anthem is "Underneath a Jersey Sky", the album's conclusion (and heir to a TMJ record's end tradition begun with Cereal Killers' "Theme Song"), which I recommend that the state of New Jersey adopt immediately. Instead of trying to somehow idealize New Jersey, the song revels in details of comforting inconsequence, which makes the fierce pride into which the song resolves all the more uplifting. "How to Be Happy", the third of the four, is to me the most pessimistic of the anthems, revolving as it does around the couplet "Learning how to be happy / And learning not to care", as if compassion and happiness are irreconcilable.

This sentiment is echoed in the album's one cover, Billy Bragg's "A New England", itself already an anthemic paragon in my book. With its rallying cry of "I don't want to change the world, / I'm not looking for a new England, / I'm just looking for another girl", the song begs to be adopted as a personal theme by the lonely and the compromising, and I cherish it because no matter how many times I try to sing it like I believe it, I just can't. It is an honest anthem, which refuses to sound true until it is. My problem (though as a reader of this column you may have other theories) is precisely that I do want to change the world. Finding "another girl", either literally or metaphorically, doesn't in itself do anything for my obsession with the idea that somehow, somewhere, there is something useful I could do (even more useful, if you can imagine, than writing music reviews). I assume this idealism won't last. I assume, because it seems to happen to everybody else I know, that some day I will break down, move to the suburbs, have kids, buy a minivan to take them to soccer practice in, and all the rest of the mundane, not-changing-the-world things that people fill their adult lives with in order to finally stop thinking about what a mess humanity has become. Idealism will come to seem insupportably pompous (as opposed to supportably pompous, which is how it seems now), and self-preservation will be all I'm left with. This slow transition is underway already, I suspect. For example, my car got broken into last week, and I'm upset enough to mention it, but not much beyond that. I'm insured, they didn't take much, and I knew the statistics when I decided to buy one. A few more times, though, and annoyance will probably evolve into outrage. Our cities are profoundly unlivable, and though I live in one because I believe they don't have to be, I may just be wrong. And so, probably, the day will come when I'll give up, when I won't care any more, when I'll sing "I don't want to change the world" to myself and realize that, at long last, I've come to believe it. And so I hold "A New England" close to me, as a litmus test, to keep track of the state of my conviction. I may be projecting (at least, I'm sure trying to project, so I hope it's working), but Too Much Joy seem to sing it the same way I do, and in this and in "How to Be Happy" I hear the painful sounds of a band trying to convince themselves that their disillusionment is more advanced than they know it really is, followed by the exhilarating reverberations of that effort failing. "Written and recorded in manic bursts of passion followed by long periods of watching tv and trying to figure out what the fuck else we might be able to do with our lives.", reads the first line of the album's credits. It would be so much easier to quit than to go on. But there is nothing else. As soul-consuming as constantly-frustrated aspirations are, there are no better options, and painful awareness of that is exactly what I want in a new national anthem. I don't want us to ever forget either how great a country this is, or how terrible. Our anthem should flaunt both our triumphs and our dissatisfactions. I'm quite sure TMJ will do a good job.

In the meantime, please go buy their record. Even if all this politico-aesthetic theory bores you, the album is giddy, eager and delightful, and sounds fantastic when played really really loud. They need both the money and the support. My coup may take me a little while to mount, and when I'm finally ready for their services I don't want to find that they've all sold their instruments and become management consultants.

As a postscript, not really on the subject of Too Much Joy at all, their Billy Bragg cover comes at an oddly appropriate moment, as walking home from the CD store after buying this album I discovered that one of Harvard Square's oldest record stores, Discount Records, has finally gone under. It was easily the worst record store in the Square, but it was also the only one whose sign you could see from the subway station, which is what I presume kept it alive. By the end, at least, it was really just a Sam Goody's front, but its name had an appealing ring, and so it was the first record store I walked into, my first day in Cambridge, over a decade ago. My suspicion that I'd come to the right city was immediately validated by the fact that there in its bins I found a record that I'd been unsuccessfully trying to find in Dallas for the preceding two years. The record, of course (or else this anecdote is more pointless than even I would tolerate), was Billy Bragg's Life's a Riot With Spy Vs. Spy. I never spent another dollar in Discount Records, so I can hardly muster an indignant sniffle at its demise, but it still seems like there's something wrong with a world in which the scenes of significant moments in our lives are routinely disassembled for reasons so tangential to our memories and our joys. We cannibalize our past, restlessly, tearing apart sources of strength and sources of pain with no awareness of the difference, unable to discern between what is rotten behind its gaudy facade, and what, though tawdry, we have built associations and structures of experience around. Sure, it was the worst record store in the Square, but that's no excuse for shutting it down. It provided a baseline, a reminder of the vapid mega-mall standard of quality that made it easier to appreciate how much better the other stores were. It blithely stocked Milli Vanilli records long after everybody else had melted them down in disgust. It kept impatient tourists from cluttering the good stores. And now that it's gone, some hapless conglomerate will open a new store just as bad, because in their myopic way they will perceive a void. How can we learn from the mistakes we make if they don't stay made? I think this, too, should go into our new anthem.

Friday, November 16, 2007

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 17:56:13 GMT

Hey again. I already posted once today, but I thought this might generate more feedback. (It's much shorter too, which is always nice). I mentioned it in the introduction of the previous post, which you should read if you get some spare time, or if you're battling insomnia, because it is forever long. Anyway, the following is a poem tradtionally attributed to Benjamin Franklin. For the want of some lit discussion, I'm posting it here. Let me know what you think.

For the want of a nail, a shoe was lost.
For the want of a shoe, a horse was lost.
For the want of a horse, a rider was lost.
For the want of a rider, a message was lost.
For the want of a message, a battle was lost.
For the want of a battle, a war was lost.
All for the want of a nail…

Friday, November 16, 2007

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 17:47:36 GMT

Hey. I wrote this a few weeks ago, basically, for no one but myself. For the want of a post, I'm putting it up. It's forever long, so don't feel bad for skipping it. (I think it's kind of preachy at parts too. Hope you can forgive me for that).

On a side note, for a truly deep thought (in a much shorter piece of writing), look up the "for the want of a nail" poem on google.

I wanted to be a writer, and I ended up working a government job. Cosmically & karmically, there's something profoundly hilarious about all of this. I'd probably be somewhat bitter about the whole thing if I wasn't too busy laughing at the life of it all. Life will take you, dip you, spring out of nowhere, bring you back up from the depths of your despair, and then at some point, inevitably, take you back into despair. However, fear not close friends, for at some point, you come back up again. It's the simple, tragic, beautiful palindrome of life: cry when you die, cry when you're born. In between, we should probably try to genuinely smile as much as you can, and cause as many genuine smiles as we possibly can. Unless you're the son of God, the palindrome is basically inevitable. What you do in between it, however, can make all the difference in the world to more people than we could likely ever imagine.

I was sitting at my cozy government job last year while working the day shift, and I got a call from an old friend. My old friend is pretty serverely epileptic, so when she asked me to watch her kid because of a doctor's appointment, I didn't think much of it. However, when I asked if she was okay, her response surprised me a little.

"Yeah, I'm fine. I had breast enhancement surgery, and this is just a check up to make sure everything's okay."

"Oh, okay" I said, not really listening. Then I caught myself.

"Wait. What kind of surgery?"

"Breast enhancement surgery."

For whatever reason, my friend was pushed to this limit, and separated with a few thousand dollars in order to...actually, I'm still not sure about that. For the record, I should note that my friend has previously done some modeling, which - through the power of my amazing "connection of thought" - leads me to believe that there were already a large number of people who found her attractive. I remember being at a rock show with some friends, and walking her back to buy a cd. Some guy in one of the bands signed it, and then after she turned away, stopped me with a "Hey dude," and a thumbs up. This point, I hope, accomplishes two things.

1. Dispels once and for all the theory that being in a band makes you cool. Granted, subtlety is not a luxury which is afforded to us all, but there should be at least some code of decorum afforded to perfect strangers when in non "meat-market" environments. Yes my friends, "rock stars" are just people like us with odd parents just like ours who occasionally act in peculiar ways (like giving a "thumbs up" over a perceived girlfriend) that make other people judge them...just like the rest of us.

2. Guys (who are mostly stupid I'm told) by and large found her attractive. However, this doesn't seem nearly as important as point one, though it is the one which is relevant to this piece, so I'll focus on it for a bit.

Why, then, would a person who was already accepted by some standard of judgement feel insecure about it, and thus take extra care just to make sure that her acceptance in this category was not in question? Why would she?

Why would we all?

More importantly, why do we all?

I kind of got lucky in high school in the sense that I'm not sure if I was well known or not, well liked or not, and well thought of or not. It didn't matter much to me then as it still doesn't now (10 year reunion: should I stay or should I go?), but I was lucky enough to be able to bump into a handful of people who would just randomly open up to me on occasions for whatever reasons people randomly open up to people they're not tight with in the traditional sense, and through some of these conversations I learned a few things, and I'll get around to dropping a a nugget or two into the bowl that is the following four paragraphs.

My school was really too big to have "popular" kids, which was good. It was also too big to have anybody on the opposite end of that, which was even better. Still, we had Homecoming and we had Prom, and so I guess if you were to really try to define the stereotypical "popular kids" (like an old friend of mine always did and still does to this day), that might be a good place to start.

One day during a study hall I started talking to a girl who was a buddy of a friend. Rather, she started talking, and I was just the guy sitting next to her, so I got to be on the other end of the conversation. We talked about a poetry project we both needed to complete, and a mutual teacher that we both had, and then she let her guard down and started talking about her friends. One sentence led to the next, and I realized that she had next to zero confidence in the reliability of her chosen relationships.

Fast forward a few months, and it's the same story with a different cheerleader. The people who perceive themselves as popular worry about staying as such.

They have something that they feel is looked upon as good, and they go out of their way to maintain it. That's not dissing the concept of popularity (though that'd be easy to do), but that's just a statement of the human condition. Even people who think they're well liked worry primarily about whether they are well liked or not. My friend who is pretty worries about whether or not people think she's pretty. I have no idea if people truly enjoy my company or not, but I've spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about it, which makes me realize that the thing I'm pointing out is not something that I'm above. I breathe the same air as the affirmed insecure. I think we all do it in some way or another.

Fast forward to the future of my friend, which is now the more immediate past, and she has gotten involved in a Bible study. My friend had been considering the concept of God, and what that means exactly for a mentionable amount of time. Not really "actively seeking," as we the religious disenfranchised like to say, but just thinking that admist everything, there has to be more. This was the same process that I went through, so I sort of felt like I didn't want to interfere or rush things along to make myself feel good. Fast forward to the past's future (but still not to the current's present), and while her newly found Bible study group was deciding to give up things like chocolate or whatever for lint, she says she wants to give up her bitterness. The fact that she even came to this conclusion shows how sincerely she was examining herself. The fact that she was going to fight against something that could make her into a happier, more well adjusted adjusted, and better person relationally speaking made it even more profound. It sort of made my "sacrifice" seem shallow by comparison.

After some tulmoutous times, she asked me to lunch about four or five months ago, and told me she was pregnant again. I was happy for her for a couple of different reasons, and though she was nervous, I knew she would come out swinging like a champ when it mattered most. What's even better is that I'm pretty sure she knew it too. It's amazing how accomplishing a small goal like "bettering yourself" can build your confidence. However, life happened again in a far more tragic sense than I referred to earlier, and she miscarried the baby. It's common, like aids and cancer and child death due to malnutrition are common. Common and sad and dispiriting and heartbreaking. Yet, somehow since she was thinking about God or for whatever reason God does things, God took care of her. She didn't snap. She didn't leave her Bible study, and to my knowledge, she didn't stop watching the same shows she's been watching on A&E for the last five years about the scientific debates over Biblical issues. She even seemed to come out of the tragedy as a bigger gift to the world around her. She's got spirit, that one, probably more than most.

To know her previously, you might think of her as self centered, shallow, and maybe annoying at times. She was also fun loving, out going, and fiercly loyal when she thought she should be. I don't think we as people have "sides" as much as we act like we do. We can feed or starve behaviors. My friend may have some bitterness still tucked away somewhere that her plan for a family wasn't what she was dealt. I know I would (and will, because things hardly ever go to plan). I can, in my own way, train behavioral patterns into myself of not trying to please people, and just trying to do what I truly believe in, whatever that is, but of course even when I do manage to act as I should when presented with an uncomfortable situation, I'm going to sit there and worry about what the people think of me now if I've pooped on their party.

If we can go to church for just a second, something in a sermon from a couple of months ago (I think) has really stuck with me. "When Jesus told ZachAttack (okay, that wasn't said, but man it should've been) "you need to be born again," he didn't mean it in the way we think about it now." What he meant was that ZachAttack needed to have something happen to him that would turn his entire world upside down and force him to rethink his views on everything. I'm not sure if this interp is right or not (argue it out, theologians), but it really stuck with me because I think it's happened to me.

That being said, I'm a couple of years removed from my real low point now, and I think I'm pretty becoming better adjusted from everything. I'm even proud of myself at times for how I've bounced back in some ways.

That being said, it occurred to me in the shower about an hour ago (hey, I had to bathe in between all of this) that if the exact same series of events were to happen to me in the mindset that I'm in right now, I don't know think that my reaction would be any healthier or much different than it was the first time.

I've had two things that rocked me hard enough to rethink my outlook on life. One was when I was seventeen, and I decided I needed to decide what was important in life, where the misfocus was, and what adults were missing from their lives because way too many of them (at least the ones around me) seemed unhappy. Marriage, jobs, whatever - I didn't want to grow up and be like anyone around me, except maybe my older sister. I realized that I was missing a feeling that there was something pure in the world, I started looking & praying for something, and it came unexpectedly enough (to me at least) in the praying and the searching. God was there in the hunt for something that was sincere and good and innocent to think about. The goodness of God was what I was seeking. I just had no idea about that at the time.

The next one was the dreaded Summer of doooooooooooooooom, where Randy Orton got the World Title and some other things happened too. The reaction to it came in a unknown fight from yours truly against it, and truth be told, I've never been that good in fights. After about eleven or so months of fighting, I was beginning to realize that I was trying to convince myself I was happy instead of honestly smiling about things, and once that sets in, depression is a tough thing to avoid. I had a Godsend show up to do ungodly things like watch South Park and eat obscene amounts of snow cones with me to keep my spirits up, but the bottom line was that this was my fight to fight, and I had to man-up to this one myself. So life intervened (in a good way this time) for my friend, which actually worked out decently in some ways because it forced me to start being proactive in looking for good feelings again. It wasn't an "all in" search like the last time (I didn't have the confidence or energy for that effort), but I was keeping my eyes open and running with things when I'd notice them jogging up beside me.

Go through the mistakes and rebounds, highs and lows, slam the gas ahead as we pass a lot of inner turmoil and slam the breaks as we reach the present day, and when left to my own devices outside of pressure and expectations, I can find a lot of things to be happy about. Not the least of which is waking up in the middle of the night to find yourself staring at a ceiling, just to think to yourself "Ah, it's there. I'm a pretty lucky guy."

You know, I've had tons more rudimentations tonight that I could go on into, but my typing hasn't been able to keep up with my mind, and you probably gave up reading this a long time ago. Besides that, I have to get up in three hours for a free meeting with a personal trainer. There's no time like the present to start the future's habits - even if I can't afford further lessons (which I explained, but he was insistent on me coming, so huzzah).

During English courses in college (and really since fifth or sixth grade), we're taught to sum up our point at the end of a piece. However, I'm not sure what the point of all this is. I wanted it to be sincere, and I think I've accomplished that on a personal level. I wanted to talk about how we can change our lives and reactions by simply making it a point to change our habits (oops, got veered away on that one, but the beginning part of it was there. You can read it twice if you want, take a logical enough leap and you might come to the same conclusion on the matter that I did).

I also think that what we accomplish doesn't really matter to most people. What we do on the way to that accomplishment does. "It's the journey, not the destination." You've heard it. You may have said it. You wonder how many high school yearbooks it's appeared in over the years. The cool thing is that if we're paying attention, we're always trying to figure a little bit more out, and if we pay enough attention and get lucky simultaneously, we may even cough up a grain of truth that we never knew we had in us to begin with. If June through September of 2004 happened again, I might not go through a different process than the one I went through the first time it happened, but at least I'm aware of that, so that I might not get freaked out by that realization later if such a reaction (preceded by such an event of course) does come to pass.

After all, it's just life. Spouses really can and often do love each other. Kids love their parents. Married people (and single people to) make love as an act of vulnerability to each other sometimes. Homeless people will joke around a steel can fire for both warmth and company. Approach a stranger and the joke they make may not be to ease the discomfort, but it may be worth it just to share life for a minute.

After all, it's just life. There's crying at the beginning and end. In the middle, if we're lucky, maybe something worth writing about will happen.

That being said, I love my sister, my best friend, my biz-natch, and all of you too. Now cue the indie song as I go to fade out.

Thursday, November 08, 2007

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 19:05:30 GMT

First off, I need to send a shout to my Soul Brutha. Thanks to a new program, Tommy is allowed to receive emails now. Here's the info: (I just cut and pasted from L.T.'s site)

www.4inmates.com

he was really excited about it and he told me to let everyone know. so now you know, and knowing is half the battle

if you want to send him an email through this website, here's some info you will need:

Name: Thomas Jewell

Facility: Roederer Correctional Complex, LaGrange KY

Inmate #: 174893 (end L.T's Whitman-esque transcript. Even her basic fact giving screams of poetic verse).

Speaking of, this (here below) doesn't reflect anything I'm going through right now. I just felt like writing it.

40 days in the desert, to face hardship and sin

And only when it was over did the angels attend

Sun shines during day

But disappears from sight

When blackness abounds

Only sun's reflection gives light.

Ah, the poetry of lonliness

The beauty of the rain

The soliliquies of our sadness

That are writing out our pains

But if hope can carry the Christ

Undeserved of the pain as he was

Maybe it can carry me too

When I'd much rather just give up.

So, that's a poem in 3 minutes. Hope it didn't suck.

As for random thoughts, I've been reading a whole hecka lot lately, and I'm very lucky, because it has all been really good stuff.

- "The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon" was an awesome introduction into the world of Stephen King. Once I hit the halfway point, I zipped through the rest. I'm looking forward to tracking down "Cell" next.

- "Beethoven, Bach, and the Boys" was something Steph loaned me to read. If you've ever heard me talk about "The 5 Minute Illiad" (and if you know me, you probably have), it's exactly like that, except about music instead of classic literature. It's hilarious so far, and I can't wait to finish.

- "Naked" - I'm only one chapter into this, but chapter one was pretty good. This is also my initial intro to David Sedaris. I've heard so many good things about him, so I'm really looking forward to getting deeper into this.

- "Possible Side Effects" - This was written by the same guy who wrote "Running With Scissors." I got this before "Naked," so I'm further into it (about a 4th of the way). It's all great stuff so far. I had never thought of the Tooth Fairy (or Tinkerbell) to be such a maniacal creature before this book. However, after reading these horrible, frightening tales of bloody pillows and creepy grandmothers, I must confess that (as they say in the south) "I've been educated on the aforementioned subject matter." Or learned. I always get those two confused.

- "A Lion's Tale: Around the World In Spandex" - This was Chris Jericho's book, and since I know most of the people reading this won't care about it (not that you care about any of this anyway), I'll be brief. For the sports entertainment enthusiasts, it's a good read. All the irreverence that comes out in Y2J's character spills all over the pages of this book (I can't count how many times 80s pop music was referenced). On the wrestling front, this was probably the second best autobio I've read (right behind Foley's first book).

- In other pop culture news, the new Dashboard Confessional cd was well worth the wait. They went back to their acoustic roots, and the result was another great album. If you'r going to check it out on ITunes, I reccomend Thick As Thieves (because, when you think about it, it probably won't kill that many of us to simply breathe.)

- I'm hooked on Pushing Daises. Dudes and dudettes, this is such a fun show. If you haven't watched it yet, give it shot. The storytelling and atmosphere alone are enough to hook you in (and that's all before you get to know the extremely likable characters).

- Scrubs is back for its final round I've heard. I'm so glad they're doing one last season for the show. I've read the phrase "sitcom of the decade" tossed around by some entertainment writers, but I'll wait to see if Joey gets brought back before I jump on that bandwagon.

- It's old news, but it's still official: no more "Class" for us. It's rather sad, because "The Class" ruled. Network execs on the other hand, suck.

- How I Met Your Mother, The Office, and Boston Legal round out my weekly t.v. routine. I kind of like having shows that I watch now. Last year was the first time since high school that I really watched any scripted television show regularly. ("It's still real to me, damn it!") I owe my old roomies (and current friends) Nick & Sabrina a big ole thank you for the awesome family nights that got me into a pattern again. I owe you a pizza...when I get a few bucks to spare...which may not be for a while I'm afraid.

- I love my church. They're starting a new series this Sunday if anybody wants to tap dat. By "dat," I mean church, not Mrs. McIver.

- I'm making a conscious effort right now to slow down my life. Do less running around, but more emphasis on relaxing activities like taking walks, reading poetry, and just thinking about things instead of doing things. I expected this to help me feel less frantic at times. The unexpected side effect is that I've been a lot more appreciative for some of the things in my life. Yesterday I was thinking about how lucky I was to have a sister. I guess when I stop to think about it, I'm already really blessed, and once I realize that, I start to feel really happy. Maybe Jonathon Livingson Seagull was right - maybe sometimes Heaven really is already surrounding us. We're just to busy to realize it. Or maybe that was just me. (come to think of it, was that J.L.Seagull, or the follow up to it. I can't remember).

I guess that's all I'll write about for now. I miss Xanga. Hope everyone is comfy cozy. Enjoy the chills ("baby it's cold outside.") Later sweet potatoes.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 18:19:26 GMT

Random, but...

-I'm on the phones at work now. This is both good and bad. I miss having communication with the outside world as part of my job, so that's good. We actually get to help a lot of people too, so that's good too. Bad because when someone still owes a ton, there's nothing we can do, and that royally sucks. If I could make these debts disappear for these people without getting caught, there's a good chance I would do it. (hope Big Brother isn't watching). However, I can't, and if I could (and did get caught) I'd be in jail for a long long time, so there goes that hope. Still, it's sad to see people in debt. That part of the job sucks.

-I was going to try to throw a "community" party on the 13th of next month, and use the BSU (BCM, whatever) as the spot for it. The idea was to invite my friends, have them bring whatever friends they want to, get the house churches we have friends in to bring their bands of merry men & women, and just sort of be together for a night. When I drew up a list, so many were old BSU folks that it almost seemed more like an old weekend party, which honestly, got me even more excited about it (I swear, I would like few things more in the world than to play elbow tag with some old friends sometime soon). However, the B was booked that day, and I really don't know of another place off the top of my head that could hold as many people as might potentially come. Still, for those who are interested, WE (being any old BSUers) have been offered a free weekend night in November (the 10th or 17th) to use the BSU for a reunion night of sorts. So, if anyone is interested in setting that up, let me know, and I'll help with getting people together for it. It'd be worth all the work for one game of elbow tag. Just one. Doesn't that sound like fun?

- So, with that said, if anyone wants to hang out on Oct 13th, you're invited. I have no idea what would be going on (or if I'll try to do a community thing anyway), but if nothing else, it would probably involve Wrelstemania 3 or MST3K in the day, and just hanging out with friends at night. (I promise not to make anyone see any Cameron Crowe movies this year, even if I do still say they're all really good).

-I've been listening to a lot of REM lately. Steph was sweet enough to download my favorite song by them for me ("Half a World Away"), which I didn't have. She also downloaded a little Randy Newman, which is always good.

-2 kids at the library are arguing beside me. I'm glad we get more mellow as we get older. :)

-There's a book behind me called "The Nerd Who Loved Me." None of you dated a Vicki Lewis Thompson, did you?

-After a reccomendation from Bill a while back, I'm reading The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. I tried to get Cell, which I've heard is good from a couple of different people, but the library by me didn't have it. Still, this one is really good so far.

- I've got work in 45 min, so I have to split. So sad that Xanga isn't the rage anymore. Facebook is fun too, though. I just miss reading stuff.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 20:47:25 GMT

ps. my girlfriend is awesome.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 20:47:05 GMT

I got this movie review thing on Facebook thanks to Mr. Bill, but half way through the list, the page shifted on me, and all my witless one-liners and star ratings were lost! Oh yeah, and it happened twice! I'm so frustrated that I have to use multiple exclamation points!!!
Actually, I'm not frustrated. The movie thing was a blast, and I'm sort of looking forward to going back and filling it out again...even if it is the third time, it will still be fun.
So, for the last week and a half, I've been chilling with Steph while she has mono. So far, I've been lucky, and have steered pretty clear of all symptoms. Steph, obviously, hasn't been as lucky, though she is much better this week than she was last week. Since she doesn't have a t.v., and she doesn't have enough energy to do much aside from watch t.v., we've been watching dvd's on her laptop for the last week and a half or so. I'm normally not huge on watching t.v., but I've definitely been sucked back in, and have been having a great time hanging with my female type and watching all sorts of things that we've been wanting to watch. So far, off the top of my head, this is what we've seen:
Stephen King's The Stand - We watched all six hours straight through. We actually spent about 30 minutes looking up video stores in the area, and calling their numbers to see who had the dvd. Surprisingly (to me at least), of the four places who had it, two of them had been checked out. Still, once we found it, I drove the 20 minutes to pick it up, and oh yes my lovelies, you better believe it ruled.

Stephen King's Carrie - The original. I caught the newer, t.v. remake a couple of years ago on vacation. This was my first time to see the original though, and it, like the Stand, freaking rocked my world. A good horror movie is a good time indeed.

Along Came Polly - Steph had never seen this one, so we broke it out to watch. She liked. I was happy.

In Good Company - One of my coming of age flicks. She liked it too. Hip hip...hooray.

Seasons 4 and 5 of Friends - This is Steph's favorite show, so we watched that until, basically, we needed a change of scenery. These are actually the selections we started with.

Lucky # Sleven - Steph's roommate hated it. Steph liked it a bit more than her roommate. I loved it. LOVED it. Nick, dude, you will love this movie.

Neverending Story - It was cheesier than I remember, which is sad, because just five years ago, I still loved it. By the way, Wolgy, my theory on the greater symbolic meaning of the movie - I'm not so sure if it still holds water for me.

Ellen Degeneres: Here & Now, & Ellen: Season 2 - We both love the Ellen, so we've had a whole lotta Ellen in our lives in the last few days.

The original Sabrina, with Bogey & Steve McQueen, and the vivacious Audrey Hepburn. :)

We've done 6 and a half episodes of CSI (one of the discs was scratched). I had never seen that much of the show, and I really really liked it. (CSI is Steph's second favorite show)

Right now, we're doing V For Vendetta, and up next is 28 Days Later, to be followed (hopefully tonight) by The Number 23.

Well, she's off the phone now, so we're going to finish V. Thanks for indulging the listing. I miss Xanga. It's cool to be back.

p.s. We both finished the new Harry Potter. It was totally worth the wait.

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Sun, 15 Jul 2007 21:44:45 GMT

Well, it's mid-July, which means that Christmas is just around the corner. Since it's never too early to get a jump on holiday festivities, I thought I'd lead us all in a favorite carol of mine, "Santa's Super Sleigh."

Who's that coming round the bind?

It's Santa and his reindeer friends.

With a "Ho! Ho! Ho!"

And a "Hey! Hey! Hey!"

It's Santa's Super Sleigh!

Didn't that just bring out the spirit in everyone. Merry Christmas everybody! Enjoy the holiday season!

Snap back to reality. Oops, there goes gravity. Oh, there goes Rabbit, he choked! He's so mad, but he won't give up that easy...
Sorry. Steph is really sick, and I'm pretty worried about her, so everybody pray for Stephanie for a while. We think it's mono (either that or she's just really bored, nudge nudge, party time! Excellent!) So, we've been hanging out the last few days, watching Friends and eating bread. It's been a lot of fun actually, but I feel so bad for her. Pray she feels better soon. I haven't felt as sick as she has the last three days for years now.

Anybody wanna "battle rap" me? I was so inspired by the courage shown by one Marshall Mathers in his cinematic masterpiece "8 Mile," that I now also feel a calling to "freestyle." However, my rhymes shall be busted not at clubs, but at the freshest joint in the whole world, in front of the least whack cats of all dem boyz. The joint: Xanga. The cats: all y'all in my on-lizine communi-tie. Bring da pain. Bring da rhymes. Bring everything you got, 'cause in da end, it's gonna be me bouncing on your behind, after I suck all da flava outta your mind. Uh!

"As we warned you, 21 new songs and not one damn hit." - Over the Rhine (liner notes)

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 15:31:46 GMT

It's a nice day!
Everybody limbo!

I got two extremely awesome cds from the library the other day. One is Ohio by OTR (pictured above), and the other is a band called Philosopher's Stone. If you're killing time on ITunes, check out the 30 second samples if they have them. I think you'll be impressed.

I just joined Facebook, and now have been turned into a zombie, and am in the midst of dueling with my dear, close, personal, longtime friend, Mr. Nick McIver in a high stakes game of Paper/Rock/Scissors. Wish him luck, my pretties, because if he loses this one, his record goes below the 50/50 line and dips into the shameful pool of red.

That's it. High fives for everyone.

Friday, June 29, 2007

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 16:25:34 GMT

I've been watching news channels a lot more than I normally do this week. I did some checking up on all the storming going on in Texas when Steph was stranded there, and for a good laugh, go to her site and check out her new profile pic. However, mostly, I've been following the Benoit thing.

A seven year old kid - his own son. Even typing it so bizarre. Here's a guy that at least most of my friends who watch wrestling on a regular basis were huge fans of. I used to jokingly refer to him as "his holiness" in letters to Tommy, because we would joke about him being a wrestling miracle worker (he could drag a good match out of anyone, even if he was the only guy in the company who could). There are so many great matches in the last ten to twenty years that he has been involved in. I haven't watched anything with him since authorities discovered that he was the culprit in the crime. I know I wouldn't be able to enjoy them very much right now. It kind of gets me wondering when, or if at all, that will go away.

At the end of the day, it's just a t.v. show, and he was just a part of it, and if I can never really enjoy Benoit matches again, it's not going to be a big loss or anything. Thinking over the horrific tragedies of what happened, and that he was responsible for them kind of makes it hard to want to have anything to do with them right now.

I kind of liken it to what it would be to find out that the lead actor in your favorite movie did A or B. Do we separate the work from the man, or is it all tied together? Actually, I feel really shallow wondering about crap like this in light of the tragedy. As such, I'm going to stop writing about it. I guess right now, I care about what's important, and as such, can't see past it. La de da. I guess that's it.

Sorry this wasn't the happiest thing in the world. Maybe next time.