Constant sorrow

If Cash were still alive, and if he got it on and knocked up the soundtrack to O' Brother, Where Art
Thou, and if their illegitimate bastard child played out in the obscure-ish artsy bars of St. Louis, it would sound so much like Elemental Shakedown that they'd be out of a gig and would have to go back to their day jobs. Lucky for them that hasn't happened, so they get to continue doing their thing. Lucky for us, too.

PS: Random country-folk cover of Robert Palmer's Addicted to Love? How awesome / hilarious. Ahhahahaha. So entertained.

Potato, potato

I think I wrote about this once before, the only difference being that tonight I threw in some green and red peppers I had lying around, which made it look purdy. And my new phone is all fancy pants & shiny and makes posting fotoes easy (as opposed to the last one, which was terribly tedious).

Ole, ole ole ole

So. Went to see some rock music tonight. You know how I do.

The first band... What can I say? That reinforce every gut reaction I have about opening bands. It's like in a kung fu film, when you kill some kid's father, and he wants revenge. But you're a master, so you gotta be like, "No. Go and train for ten years, then come see me again." It wasn't that they were bad, really (except of course for the parts where they were, in fact, bad), it's just that they needed practice. At times they seemed unsure of themselves. And if you want to be a rockstar, gosh darn it, you have to OWN it. But, bless them, they tried. And isn't that enough? The answer of course is no, it isn't, but I'll give them points nonetheless.

Headlining were some Irish dudes I didn't know, and I was only there to see them cause I'd scored free tickets. The Coronas was their name, and I walked in expecting nothing. I quickly realized that they indeed had something. My first clue was the first song, which it seemed I'd heard before. Still, I took my time and played it safe, hoarding my best dance moves carefully. I let them do a few more while I figured out what they were about. As it turns out they are about rockin' Irish music, and I'm real glad I went in spite of it all (that being going solo, and a six mile roundtrip walk in the rain cause I didn't feel like biking). I toyed with the possibility of starting the dancing as the floor was wide open, but elected not to so as to save myself from embarassment. I kind of regret that decision as I missed my shot to show my conviction, though I more than made up for it later. Four girls that had a table up front jumped up for some song they knew, and I'd thought they'd snatched my thunder... But lo, they and the rest of the crowd that jumped up only danced for the one before becoming timid again. The time was mine. And I had a target. I saw that the not-lead-singer guitarist was quietly working his butt off, to the point that he was soaked with sweat, and I felt that deserved a bit of recognition. So. I sauntered over and stood right in front of him (he didn't see me). I took one foot, and brazenly put it up on the stage (he didn't see me). He played his little heart out, and I let loose. I worried that I was in over my head, but there was no turning back at this point. I am committed. I have to see this through to the bitter end. Nevermind how self-conscious I feel... as if I naked and on display, dancing with myself. Miraculously, somehow it all worked out in the end. Didn't go so far as dancing with any of the pretty girls there, but I did warrant a mention by the lead singer, and got a compliment on my moves talking to him after the show. I'll call that a win.

Other highlights:
~Seeing a guy on a bike huffing and puffing up a hill (one I know well, mind you), randomly yelling encouragement at him out of the night, his sense of semi-recognition that I was probably a cyclist on foot and not a jerk or weirdo, and his definite recognition as he passed and I could see the problem was he rode a fixie and said something to that effect.
~The first post ever entirely from a phone (sorry if there are typos and junk, I can hardly see what I'm doing), and still getting in music references even though I am without a computer.

A series of tubes

You guys...

The internets are running out. No, seriously. At least, internet addresses are going to be exhausted before the end of the year. This is according to a Wiki article I've partly glanced through before I got bamboozled by the jargons. Do you have any idea what this means?? The interwebs is going to implode! Interwebpocalypse! We've all been so busy preparing for all the other kinds of apocalypses (if you just got here: zombiepocalypse; land-capable sharkpocalypse; raptorpocalypse) that we've been taken completely unaware of this threat. How are we supposed to get to the emails? It's so much faster than snail mail, and involves less licking - I can't bear to go back to the paper age. And what about the facebooks? Will we be forced to start having real relationships in person? I won't have it. It's all these kids today using the technologies that has brought this upon us. This is the worst thing to happen since the Y2K, and surely you all remember it took us to come back from that disaster. We are one more step down the road to the machines taking over, and I for one do not want to be a battery.

Be afraid!

Akrobatik - Internet MCs

Who's gonna save your soul now?

This one time I almost ate some dude's soul.

Not that this is what I set out to do, mind you. I didn't wake up in the morning and give a quick run through of my To Do list: pay bills, do dishes, buy eggs, eat some souls. It was pretty much an accident. It's one of those situations anyone could find his or herself in. One minute you're hanging out with friends havin' a good ol' time, the next minute BAM. Some poor sucker's soul comes sweeping towards your mouth, like when you were a kid and spoons could fly like airplanes. Everything started off innocently enough. I was visiting a local watering hole to partake in some good wholesome karaoke. After a bit of cajoling from the aforementioned friends who threatened to not let me leave until I sang, and helped by enough libation to make me not be terrified at how horrible an idea singing in front of people should be, I was primed to start things off. I put on some big pink sunglasses so as to not be able to see the danger I was in, and proceeded to do my best Lenny Kravitz impersonation. Somehow the world did not seem to implode on account of my performance, though perhaps that would have been better than what happened next. The people that sang after I warmed it up weren't so terrible, I mean they were no me but they made some good picks, enough that I could get into 'em a bit and sing and dance along. And that's when it happened. One of those friends stands up at the mic and starts in with some Tenacious D. Which just so happens to blow my mind a little bit. Still new to this karaoke thing and that was a selection that had completely escaped my notice. I accompany him from across the room as he sings the greatest and best song in the world. Everything seemed to be going fine until it got to the line "plaaay the best song in the world, or I'll eat your soul". And that was when I came up behind some dude at the next table as I sang along. BIG MISTAKE. Evidently he was too surprised to get that it was just a song, cause his eyes bugged out about a mile. He abruptly stood up, left his table of friends behind, and went to go sit down with MY table of friends where apparently he thought it was safer from rabid soul eaters. I wasn't sure what to do at that point, I was worried I had broken him or something, and what do you say at a time like that? "Oops"? So I did the best thing I could come up with, which was to sit down with his friends to half apologize / half finish singing the song. Seemed like the ideal choice.

Call Yourself a Man

I'm a big fan of life's great simple joys. The way the wind sounds or the sun looks as they stream through the trees, for example. I think it's a rather nice outlook to have for the preservation of sanity and enjoyment of life without always being caught up in the superficial. One of the great simple joys of being a man, I find, is the ability to open jars. Given that in our present day and age there is not typically much cause for me to exhibit my strength and skill by hunting, opening jars is one of the last remaining vestiges of manhood. I have upper body muscles, therefore no lid shall stand in my way. It appeals to my inner caveman. So why is it, then, that I so often find myself doing dishes while also making pasta? On the Mohs scale of jar-opening hardness*, pasta sauce jars rate at about 7.2. Not really all that difficult, because as I mentioned I happen to be a man. But with wet hands this task becomes near impossible. The hardness may as well have jumped up to >10 (that's the range of nanocrystalline jars, also known as hyperjars). Makes me feel like an infant. By now you might be thinking to yourself, "But couldn't you just wipe off your hands? Or wait for a while until they've dried?" The answer to that of course is, "No, you fool." Wiping off your hands doesn't actually work, as anyone who has ever attempted to do so in a public restroom can tell you. The paper towel dispenser / air hand dryer industry is a sham, by the way. It's completely futile. As to the second question, I don't want pasta later, I want it NOW. Perhaps some of you are possessing of enough foresight to begin cooking before the first pangs of hunger start to set themselves upon you, but my brain does not function that way. I can't even be bothered to get my procrastination done on time, because I'm always putting it off til later. As a result instead of figuring out what sorts of things I could put in my mouth I'll just lay around, gradually growing weaker while also increasingly hopeful that someone will pass by and drop something delicious within arm's reach. This is always a mistake, as my metabolism is a force to be reckoned with. It's fierce. When I don't feed it, it gets quite upset with me. Should you threaten its supply of sustenance it just might murder you in a shadowy alley. Finally, just before it threatens to turn against me (I wonder what the name of the concept of being killed by an aspect of your physiology is?), I make a last ditch desperate stance to cook something. Sated, the beast goes back to sleep for another four hours. I really ought to plan my dishwashing / pasta making schemes better, so I can help myself avoid some of these near-death situations.

*I promise it's a real thing. It's one of the lesser known contributions by Friedrich Mohs. You think diamonds are hard? Try opening a jar of them sometime. You pretty much can only get into them by scratching the lid off with other diamonds, but oh wait, they're all in the jar. Don't ask me how anyone ever got the first jar of diamonds open. I really have no idea. Some people feel the Mohs scale is a bit archaic as it is a purely ordinal scale, and would prefer to switch to rating things on their absolute jar-opening hardness, but I like the old ways myself.

Favourite Worst Nightmare

As an adult I like to think I've largely outgrown the effect of most bad dreams. I simply expect them to not have the same power over me as they did when I was a child, but every so often I find I'm proven wrong. And it's not that what I just dreamed about was among the more terrifying or disturbing things I've witnessed while sleeping... But it was solidly unpleasant and odd, for scene after scene. Somehow when you put it all together and look at the whole that makes it worse than any one of the pieces. Plus at the end it involved me being awake at 6:30 on a Sunday morning and it's twelve degrees outside, and that is not okay on so many levels. Did have some good news in it though. And a little bit about Jesus. Not the part about getting nailed to stuff, either, just about Jesus being Jesus, and going for a walk. At first it was historically inaccurate: Jesus and one of his boys were trying to get away from something to someplace else so they had to travel under cover of darkness. For a moment it looked like any typical walk you or I might go on, then my dream fact checker chimes in, he says "Hey, ancient Jerusalem didn't have sidewalks. Or streetlights. Come on. Keep it real." All that disappeared to be replaced with what he thought was a more factual representation, including a rocky arid landscape blanketed by almost pure darkness. And sandals. They then continued on their way, but now I was terribly concerned that they would walk right into or off a cliff (could they have even a few streetlights, for safety?), or that they would get blisters. Then there was another part about playing ultimate, or trying to. Couldn't throw or catch or even run worth a damn. That's what sitting around for weeks and eating pie will get you. I predict this will be repeated in real life in about eight weeks. And it isn't like I'm the best player ever or anything, but relatively speaking I should have been smoking people right and left. Instead I was so very mediocre. Can't say I care for that at all. Especially when the wind picked up to a strength capable of carrying off small dogs and little girls in red slippers. So not at all helpful. But then my friend got married and bought a house, and it was kind of out of the blue, but I was happy for him. That was nice.

Matt & Kim - Good Ol' Fashion Nightmare