People Still Listen to "Free Bird" for Fun

I have returned, and with a new look. I don't know how less than ten posts merits a considerable redesign...attribute that to a certain restlessness of spirit.

I don't profess to be a world traveler, because I haven't traveled the entire world, or even that much of it. I have jumped off cliffs in Greece, seen women breast feed on the streets of Italy, seriously considered purchasing an all-leather Toronto Blue Jays hat in the SkyDome, and even settled for ramen in Tokyo because that's what you eat when the only thing you know how to say in Japanese is "Hey Junichiro Koizumi, I'm lookin' for the can." Yet there is much soil I have not set foot on and much contaminated water I have not gulped.

Perhaps the most appealing of vacation destinations, to me, is not anywhere that has been featured on MTV Spring Break or The Da Vinci Code or the Fear Street series (Goosebumps represent). Rather, I reserve a special corner in my heart, right next to the guy ahead of me in the line at Best Buy, who, at some undoubtedly low point in his life decided it would be a good idea to get the symbols from Led Zeppelin IV tattooed on his forearm, for the lake town in the vein of Dirty Dancing. Usually a loose confederation of backwater metropolises held together by an economic rush that comes with the changing of the seasons, you know these places. You've been there. Or worse, you like Dirty Dancing with its time-traveling soundtrack. Each vacation spot has its own hijacked OBX regalia and countless microscopic vendors that pepper the landscape with goods of negative value, which include the zenith of all decorative items for one's lake house, Margaritaville-inspired phrases with corresponding artwork. Personally, Jimmy, I don't care how great the lake is, I'm crying with the saints about the state of the sinners.

What is it? Nostalgia? The something-for-everyone idea that more exclusive locales like East Timor lack? The relative proximity of lakes in some states? Imagine the aggravation Minnesota residents endure when picking which lake to go to every summer. Actually, after some research, I have come up with a few things. Minnesota is a land of lies. It is not the "Land of 10,000 Lakes," but more like the "Land of 11,842 Lakes." This means one thing: the Minnesota DMV is clearly against the War on Terror and is loaded with insurgents. We should really put all of our eggs in one basket at this point, and that basket lies with the last bastion of hope, Alaska, land of over three and a half million lakes. Good God. Incidentally, the growers cooperative Land O'Lakes, is in Wisconsin, which has never made any outrageous claims regarding the enumeration of small bodies of water within its borders. Lakes have more prominence in America than any one of us originally thought. Back to "Free Bird"...

It is the timelessness of the whole scene that has won me over. Not in the "nobody puts Baby in the corner" sense, but in the weather-beaten, wooden signs dotting the road that are stained green from overgrowth, and the gas stations, houses, and restaurants that haven't had fresh coats of paint since that moon landing hoax thing. The appeal lies in water and the possibility of Fortean creatures roaming the depths, although "Fortean creatures" and "depths" are terms used most liberally here. Everything has been held back decades, almost as if time only chooses to advance three months per year. At these lake resorts, Mr. Gorbachev hasn't torn down any walls and Elian Gonzalez isn't a twinkle in anyone's eye, thankfully. Sure, the ways to get to these places and the methods of transportation once one is on the water have changed dramatically, and thankfully so. I can attest to that personally, having used herculean strength to save a Sea Doo from joining Davy Jones' Locker and Marina. Read: it almost done sunk.

These places will never lose their luster. Why? They don't have any luster, and they never did. They are the most primal and basic destinations for fun of any sort. It is essentially like going to someone else's house for a while. Which is true, unless you have a house of your own, and then I must cast judgment upon you for any Jimmy Buffet sayings attached to the walls of your abode.

Tangents have formed their own tangents which have formed rival tangent clubs in this entry, I know. Allow me one last attempt to distill the principal idea here.

Change is certainly a constant. I have watched my hometown fall to the mercy of developers as worthless sprawl engulfed a place that had enough sprawl anyway. These lake towns are different. When time beckons them to proceed into the future, they calmly resist and retreat to the past. There is a certain element of escapism in them. You can see it in the rickety wooden structures, in the glass ketchup bottles, in the analog gas pumps, and in the long miles of greenery dotted by the occasional home. These are places where people do, in fact, still listen to "Free Bird" for fun, where the irony of the disasterpiece has not quite reached some locales. They oblige progress only at the slightest increments, and unfortunately that has come with OBX lookalike merchandise and big box stores, but life is not perfect. But it might have been with that leather Toronto Blue Jays hat. If only.

Lunch Special #5, Please

GoodTimesatTheMC: I want to blog something but I am not sure what to do.
Sloth514: do what I do
Sloth514: Don't
GoodTimesatTheMC: Yeah, well, yours...kinda sucks.
Sloth514: Yeah well
Sloth514: Yeah

I alternate between having a ton of topics to choose and having absolutely nothing at all to say. No one wants to hear about the minutiae of my day because that's mindless in itself, and you can always read that in Rosie O'Donnell's blog or what have you, unless it is possible to somehow enrich the tapestry of the mundane with something more cosmic and with more cusses. My life chronology aside, here are some failed topics I have recently thrown to the wastebasket wolves along with the idea that Paramount will release Season 3 of The Adventures of Pete and Pete in the next decade:

- new traffic fines imposed in Virginia effective 7/1/2007 (already a Facebook group, so old news)
- Detroit Tiger Gary Sheffield's comments on the racialist atmosphere of the New York Yankees (expected)
- pregnancy of Nicole Richie (this)
- how it is weird that Ralph Fiennes' given name is pronounced "Rayf" (haven't figured it out)

You see what I'm getting at here. Current events are so blessed hard to discuss without a person looking like the written equivalent of refried beans or maybe tostaguac, whatever the hell tostaguac is anyway, I don't have a Taco Bell menu in front of my face here. New ideas and comments about happenings are difficult to address, so the first person to slap down an opinion like it's UNO ATTACK AND OH MY GOD THE CARDS WON'T
STOP COMING HELP DROWNING IN CARDS SO MANY DEAR JESUS HELP ME RED 8 RED 3 GREEN 3 WILD CARD

It's Just Genocide (America's Funniest Home Videos)

America's Funniest Home Videos must stop its deception. Am I wrong? They all seem to be retrieved from giant camcorders that probably went out of style when foreign correspondents stopped using them after the situation in Kosovo. Which is to say, VHS. Consider this, really. Every clip from America's Funniest Home Videos recalls Clinton, the dawn of the Internet, and Aerosmith's "I Don't Wanna Miss a Thing," while looking washed-out, grainy, and having the audio quality of a Nixon smoking gun tape. You watch five cats fall into aquariums, kids smack each other in the testicles with bats, and grandmothers fall out of rickety patio furniture for forty-plus minutes only to discover that this video was pried out of a dead JVC in a Michigan attic a few years back and things have dramatically changed, sort of. The show now recalls Clinton, the possible regulation of the Internet, and Aerosmith's "I Don't Wanna Miss a Thing." I don't know. Maybe the slapstick is lost on me. Or maybe it was never there...

Maybe that was uncalled for; I have nothing against Tom Bergeron. I don't. Really. But what kind of anything drops a letter in an acronym, AFV? How many little kids are you trying to confuse?

In the end, cultural touchstones are pretty important, even America's Funniest Home Videos, as they recall the particular moments in history as time folds forward. Truthfully, there have been worse things out there: the Yugo, Red Planet with Val Kilmer, and the Three-Fifths Compromise, to name a few.

In keeping with a sense of self, I suppose we're done here. Sometimes the well of creativity runs dry and the scary little girl crawls from the bottom and out from your TV on all fours, and before you know it you're Martin Henderson and your face looks like a Denny's Grand Slam.

Dour Diatribes Dumped From My Dome

One negative side to any sort of long-running personal canvas of any kind is that it is often subject (and prisoner) to the restless boredom of its creator. Manifestos of mirth and bulletins of bullshit abound within an author's aggravatingly asinine attempts at alliteration (how's that for self-realization?), and the unfortunate blog/journal/diary/blank sketchbook you picked up off the Barnes and Noble shelf is inevitably forced to be the mute soap box for, as the nascent saying goes: "Nothing of any real worth!"

While I am fairly sure that the following is an example of my disquietude and also desire to beef up a blog that has recently crawled from the primordial ooze, I am not so sure that my brief selection is all that worthless.
Really, I just wanted to speak briefly on alliteration, because if nothing else, I think it's a source of entertainment and gives writers a chance to essentially construct a written house of cards: impressive if executed with the proper caution yet a recipe for disaster if improperly pursued. Plus, using alliteration can basically make you look like the biggest asshole in the world if you can do it. Hey, this is secondhand smug.

Consider this.

While pondering a proper pursuit for publishing, I put presently the possibility of prompting persons of parts unknown to pontificate the peculiar pursuit of perennial proverbs. Which is, like, totally, basically saying that I was thinkin' about tellin' ya'll about words that repeat. Whatever. Or, if you like, a word smith waxing with wonderful windy words from a well-intentioned wellspring. You get it. This was inspired by a conversation I had earlier with a converted reader.

Apparently, there is a readership? I wonder if this blog has more readers than, say, Leon Czolgosz's blog. I bet his has some crazy shit, you know? Dude is crazyyy. Anyway. Thanks for reading and the kind words and compliments.

Finally...

wishingtilwinter: i just started my period :-(
wishingtilwinter: WOAH
wishingtilwinter: WRONG IM
wishingtilwinter: SOOOORRRRYYYYYY

Fighting with Fire Axes

My apologies for Thursday's post taking a detour down the verbose and the Drowning Pool. As I said before, I did real things at real places this week. Tuesday found me and several of my long-standing contemporaries camping in the quasi-remote town of Front Royal, Virginia. Though I have not completed extraordinary feats of survival along the lines of The Blair Witch Project, Survivorman, or Simple Life Goes to Camp, I would hazard to say things were pretty easy for us, save the persnickety paranoid Asian woman at the front desk of the campground who freaked out like the Rain Man when we inspected her merchandise around what was essentially an amalgamation of a Lost and Found bin and a robbed 7-11. In all seriousness, the general store at the Front Royal Campground legitimately hawks the possessions and arguably, antiquities, of those who stayed on its diamond-hard soil. While perusing the store I noticed price tags on discarded and broken water guns, weather-worn tchotchkes, and even a faux San Francisco Giants batting helmet from the mid-1990s that was most likely given away at a promotional night during a Barry Bonds off year.

I suppose that every post will take a long-winded divergence. My "bad."

After Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves were banished from poking and prodding the Crown Jewels of Front Royal, we set up camp with relative ease, aside from having to use travel-sized jackhammers to loosen up the earth for tent stakes. In the end, our Jimmy Stewart-straight stakes would look more like former U.S. Senator Conrad Burns (R-MT) than anything else.

A sporting game of wiffleball followed camp setup, what with countless trees, rocks, and other natural obstacles forbidding us from an average game. Still, a game of men was played and afterwards a hearty meal was consumed. Then, it was time to pass around a bottle of Maker's and see who could bullshit the biggest tale, since we all know nothing of any interest. Hemingway might have been proud.

The real objective of all of this tomfoolery was to float down the Shenandoah River in giant rafts for several miles, a goal we succeeded in completing the following morning and afternoon, in spite of nagging precipitation. Ignoring the warning plastered all over the putrid bathroom walls of Front Royal Canoe Company, we shucked our life jackets and popped tops as soon as the drop off point was out of sight. Other parties around us were significantly offended and really made it a point to keep their distance.

If you have never floated down a river, I must tell you that it is an activity you should consider. It is something that is both relaxing and invigorating, basically like the Chicken Soup series without reading anything. There are times when the river required strength and speed, and other times when it required patience and deference. We dodged snakes and swung from ropes, shot water guns at mating dragonflies (somewhat mean), paddled, pushed, grunted, and even napped our way to glory.

It was a time. Perhaps something less narrative when we meet again?

A Career in the Minor Leagues

Ahoy readership (if there is any)! I have returned following a brief furlough that found me in real places doing real things. I will pilot this one straight before doing some cerebral acrobatics.

Monday night found me in the company of the mythical Stephen Patrick Morrissey at the supposedly critically-acclaimed NorVa on Monticello in downtown Norfolk. This I consider to be farcical, at least in the sense of the NorVa's billet and radio stations/promotional companies The NorVa teams with, creating some of the most horrifically ghastly scenarios ever to be dreamt of by the human race. For example, in the month of July, the venue is hosting dated-screamo band Atreyu, who sound like thousands of dogs being crammed into a garbage disposal; what might be trumped by the dual-guitar cacophony sludge of Atreyu is what follows Atreyu on the July calendar...Drowning Pool.

Now, I'm not really hip to the history of Drowning Pool, but their singer died five years or so. If I were Drowning Pool's bassist, I would have come to the realization that my crappy band has lost its singer and we should all really start thinking about not being in a crappy band. But no, they persevered and are back in action. Sweet. Good for them, I guess. They can follow in the footsteps of other bands that decided to go forth, like The Doors, Nirvana, and the Yankees after the death of Thurman Munson in 1979.

As you are well aware, the Yankees did win the pennant in the strike-shortened season of 1981 but lost to the Dodgers in the Series, and did not win the pennant again until 1996. The Doors and Nirvana were having rebuilding years in 1981 and failed to make it out of the second division.
But what is truly, truly worse about all of this is that days before the "respective" Atreyu and Drowning Pool shows, bands will compete to open for the two red-stater bands. It is hard to use variations of the root word "respect"when talking about Atreyu or Drowning Pool, but I guess that no one wants to spend a career in the minor leagues.

The Morrissey show on Monday was sponsored by 96X, 106.1 WROX FM, which purports itself to be "Hampton Roads' Extreme Rock Radio Station." There is no need to debate the semantics of what is extreme, although I would put my life on the line to say that 96X DJs ain't spinnin' any Swedish black metal any time in the next century, so that's that. In any case, I really laughed my ass off when I found out 96X was sponsoring the show, because 96X has probably never put any sort of Morrissey recording into its equipment. To corroborate this, let's see what they have played in terms of artists and frequency, at least since 12AM today, courtesy of their website:

Linkin Park: 13 times
Red Hot Chili Peppers: 8 times
Green Day: 6 times
Peter Bjorn and John: 5 times WHAT THE HELL!?
Morrissey: ...0 times

Let's be mindful of the time stamp, as I wrote this around 6:45PM on Thursday. Even Interpol, the next band 96X is sponsoring for a NorVa show, got 1 play in the last 18 hours. We're all lucky PETA is headquartered in Norfolk, otherwise The Moz would have added some time to his decade-plus long absence from Hampton Roads. And no one needs to listen to Linkin Park 13 times in less than 24 hours. Sorrow did not come in the end, as Morrissey and his tight, incendiary backing band made the scalped eBay tickets worth more than the sticker price.

Careless Caroms Careening Off My Cranium

One thing that has been busting my chops for some time is the ubiquity of the Coldplay-afterbirth band The Fray. By all accounts (a pun here), these dudes should basically be the richest people on the planet from radio royalties. Chances are, if you turn on the radio at any time of day, any place in the world (aside from Afghanistan YOU GET 'EM DUBYA YEAAAAAAHHHHHH), you will hear this band. However, this makes little to no sense. The Fray are still riding on the coattails of 2005's How to Save a Life, which, unless The Fray are the Beastie Boys and can afford six-year gaps between records, is about ninety-five billion years too late. I thought radio sucked the life out of new stuff by the same artists on the big record labels, but maybe this summer they're shorthanded and have to eviscerate the audio cadavers that are The Fray's singles. Or something.

What I find confounding is the omnipresence of The Fray on the radio. I am not a man of the radio myself, but it is always on in one room of the house or another, and The Fray are always there, telling you about saving lives in a cable car or something over tepid piano licks and air-conditioned riffs. Think of it like opening your fridge and always seeing a case of Caffeine Free Diet Coke: it's better for you than Coke and has a fraction of taste more than water, but is it really worth popping the top? It's better to keep the fridge closed and do your part not to further tear holes into the ozone layer.

I equate this whole Fray thing to filling out a form with all of the things you like about music, and then being given a band that is all of those things, only horribly wrong. It's as if The Fray followed directions in How to Be a Good Band for Dummies. It is all very sterile, uninspired, and formulaic. Anything more I say about this will probably border on plagiarism.

What is much more of a good time than using Fray records as skeet is wiffle ball. That is a damn game of men.

Before I go, I found this in the August 2007 Ladies' Home Journal:

"Feeling inspired to start a blog? Great, but don't throw away your handwritten journal just yet. Journaling and blogging serve very different functions. Blogging is a performance - you're not just writing for yourself, you're writing for a digital audience and hoping that their response will validate you. That undermines the honesty achieved when you're writing for your eyes only, says James W. Pennebaker, PhD., a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin."

Well, how's this for honesty: I was taking a shit when I read that article. Why else would I be reading Ladies' Home Journal? Although the celebrity chefs special on summer cooking was worthwhile, I must say.

Real stories about real people doing real things in the days ahead.

A Sophomore Slump

It's pretty hard to top Genesis 1:1-3 for an opening act, so I have pretty much embraced the sophomore slump. I can't keep quoting the Bible for a blog, or else it will end up being The Bible Richie Oliver Version, which would basically be me retyping the King James Version on the Internet. *cue people foaming at the mouth about the choice of Bible I decided to quote* Is it still in italics if it's just "Bible" and not The Bible?

People ask me: "What's your theme? What's the blog's angle?" I don't know. It's not about classics or sports or the quilted, quicker picker-upper, specifically. It could be, but that is not my focus. I actually discovered a guy who blogs about wisteria. Keep doing the damn thing, dude. If I'm off-base and your blog isn't about wisteria, forgive me. It's the sophomore slump. This blog has no angle.

Letters will form words, words will form sentences, sentences will form paragraphs, and paragraphs will form a story.That is what it's about. Life is enough to write about, and it is enough to write about life. Plus, this is more environmentally friendly and leaves no embarrassing paper trail when I am middle-aged. I think. I have no idea. I am most likely wrong. At least that's what I was voted in high school: "Most Likely to Be Wrong." It was cruel how vague the title was, but then again it was also cruel to find out what a tossed salad was from my librarian. CRUEL! But those are tax dollars, you know?

Today, you learned about wisteria. So did I.



Jon Voight looked like this in 1988!

This has been a sophomore slump.

Is this thing on?

In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

If you're going to imitate, you might as well imitate a best-seller.

Here we go.