A couple of months ago I got a mix from a friend, two mixes, actually. She’d made them for me but then forgotten to hand them off…I later found them and since they already had my name scrawled on the silver top coat, I decided to take them. One wound up in my car, and unfortunately it’s a little too slow for car-driving tunes. Music too slow induces a near coma, and while it’s quite nice on a dreary day, lying about across a couch, it doesn’t bode well for operating a motor vehicle. I remember that the last time I listened to it I was driving back from Wal-Mart just a mile from home and was sprawled along my door’s open windowsill entranced with the slow rhythms and just barely aware of my surroundings.

The other mix found itself in my cd changer and in the envious spot of Disc One, so that every time the player wakes up from being ‘off’, it starts with this CD. Part of it is the joy of listening to it on a pretty decent stereo…not my dream one for sure, but it’s better than a boombox or one of those everything-in-one-box jobs that seems to be the craze: small nondescript home theater that impersonates enveloping sound. Perfect for those discriminating listeners who aren’t bothered that the necessary dynamic range, the whole freaking soul of the music can’t be successfully returned in a room by 2.5″ or 4″ drivers and a 6 1/2″ “woofer” in a box in the corner. Give me my gaudy black boxes (until I can afford the ostentatious yet beautiful electrostatic loudspeakers) that sing without sounding forced.

Excuse that past rant. Anyway, I got some new gems by people I’d heard of any obviously never gave the time to, or perhaps I simply wasn’t ready for them yet. Radiohead, singing There there. Kills me. Then along a few tracks later comes Steve Earle, duetting with Lucinda Williams on You’re Still Standing There. I thought There there killed me. Ha! The ache in their voices is echoed by that harmonica just perfectly. It gives me that glorious itch in my ear and jaw, much like Rufus Wainwright. It’s such a real feeling and it’s sooo annoying, yet I love it. I can’t explain it…like hayfever crossed with an orgasm.
Next song: Lucinda Williams duetting with David Crosby on Return of the Grievous Angel. Wow.

A few songs later as the mix nears its end and I am caught unawares by a fluttering row of words falling like dominoes in the end of the 2nd verse…

To each burn a candle for you
To make bright and clear your path
And to walk, like Christ, in grace and love
And guide you into my arms

It so interested me that I played the song again and again and the more I played it I was absolutely floored by Nick Cave singing Into My Arms. It’s sitting on the same shelf as Jeff Buckley’s version of Hallelujah - the same, but different.

This mix is so very not a mix I would make, but all the same, it’s such a mix that I love so very much.

While at a get-together this past Saturday, I think I agreed to shoot the wedding of some friends in a couple months.  I had pulled out my camera, and she said that she needed me to use it, then explained it was for her wedding.  I’ll have to get back with her to verify that it was a for-real request, but in the meanwhile, I’m all sorts of psyched up about it.  The little bit of wedding shooting I did last summer was almost narcotic.  It’s a great venue for me to embrace my empathy and tie it in with my love of shooting.  If I knew of any way to get the ball rolling on it, I know for certain it’s a career move I’d be able to make…it feels so right.

So there, I finally come to terms with the thing with earning potential that makes me happiest.  Now I just have to get lucky.

I also sorta wish I could have started over, beginning with my 23rd birthday.

…and the needle has landed.  Whatever that means, really.  Well, other than the title of an awesome Neko Case song.

Just finished listening to Carboot Soul, which I’d never done before…I am soooo mellow right now, it makes me wish it was Friday night and I was hanging out with friends, sipping along and having a nice groove of a time.  Instead, I’m wondering how long it’ll take me to fall asleep and what mood I’ll be in tomorrow morning, and how long it’ll take me to really become active, given all the tasks I have waiting for me at work…but I relish the work.  I love to be busy, which I haven’t been the past 10 days after finishing my tour of Arkansas.  6 weeks and 5200 miles of driving all over the state, installing computers, fixing issues, and trying to make people happy.  I LOVE that part of my job.  I love having the answers, making people happy, and being out in the country with them.  As luck would have it, I ended just before we got things like nice weather and Daylight Saving Time.

Must remember definition of a paragraph, and the implementation thereof.

So anyway, um, uh, yeah.  (Quotes from Ani DiFranco’s Living In Clip as a segue into Letter to a John, and  love to steal it any and every time possible).

Other notable things…I’m riding again.  the weather was nice and I’ve been on the River Trail twice last week…only 16 miles total so far, but it’s still much better than what I did 365 days ago.  My butt isn’t quite in the proper shape though.  Of course it never was last year.  I have a new saddle and I’m tweaking with the positioning.  I think I have well padded shorts.  I dunno…might be all the extra belly weight pushing down on the seat that’s making things uncomfy.  I dunno…just never really remembered feeling like this when I was younger.  The good news is that my legs are still strong, and will onyl get stronger.  Figuring I should lose some weight as well in the process, the improvements should be wonderful.   Hoping to leave a Monday of work and drive home and get the bike on the road before 6pm…that’s my main goal for the day, to have a nice ride.  I even got an invite to go riding with Kelly’s marathon team cap’n dude…felt awesome to have someone invite me along.  Alas, I’m about 2 weeks from feeling ready (stamina and hiney) from riding with others.

Found my tiny camera, so hopefully I’ll have the opportunity to take some fun shots of things I happen across while I ride.

I’m quickly finding myself thinking nonsense and close to writing the same so I’ll end it here.  Hopefully updates will be soon.

After getting a youtube vid sent to me by a friend, I wound up searching for all sorts of things, and came across some of my favorite songs, with accompanying music videos that I’d never seen because they never make mainstream American tv.  This here innernet is pretty durn cool.

Among the big winners was Lush’s Single Girl.  They do a play on the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral.  Makes me smile, but also sad that I didn’t see this 11 years ago.

I went to Des Arc today.  Actually had to stop in the middle of Main Street to let the chicken (rooster, actually) cross the road.

I didn’t realize such things really did happen, and yes, I foolishly left the camera at home.

Leave it to Fox for unintentional humor.  Then again, maybe I’m the only one with a sense of humor so screwed up to imagine this connection, but I’m sitting here watching the Orange Bowl and they have Terry Donahue broadcasting the color commentary.  He sounds almost exactly like Fred Willard as Buck Laughlin, providing the ‘color’ in Best In Show.

I never claimed to be normal.

I’m sure it has something to do with me always trying to decipher the code that makes my Wordpress templates work after 10pm.  After that recent superlong post, my sidebar got relegated to the bottom of everything and the only template that seemed to work in the interim is this basic out-of-the-box one.  I’ve learning on the fly, but also, very simple ideas are failing to be grasped by my mind.  Yet another clue why I’m not a programmer.

grumble.

Watching Perfect Square, an incredible live R.E.M. show from Germany back in 2003 and am loving it immensely.  Wishing I can catch something like that myself sometime…so I look up something about them at allmusic and discovered that Peter Buck turns 50 in 8 days.  That is so not right.  Stipe is the baby of the bunch at forty-six.

Did our parents freak out when Brian Wilson or Paul McCartney got O-L-D?  Am I simply over reacting?  Perhaps, but it still sucks….everyone is getting older.  I’m not quite reminiscing this blogpost already, but I’m close.

Yet, despite it all, I feel fine.  Fine.

 (it’s time i had some time alone……….)

“A song about bitterness, unhappiness and dynfunction…oh wait, that’s ALL my songs.” - Aimee Mann on her live DVD, which I’m watching right now and is just incredible.

There’s a neat little thing I’ve noticed as I drive all over the place on highways.  It’s especially evident if I’m using cruise control to mainstain a steady speed.  My speed will wind up being 1 or 2 mph faster than the car I’m preparing to drive past, then all of a sudden, the constant rate of closure diminishes, or perhaps even reverses as the driver begins to speed up.  After a while they’re several car lengths ahead of me and then once again, I begin to get closer again.  Eventually I’ll wind up past them, but it’s a neat little thing because, for all I can tell (and it’s happening often enough that I feel comfortable in saying) it’s not a conscious effort.

The other interesting thing is that most all culprits of this action are male, and who appear to project dominant tendencies.  It’s a crude psuedo-scientific analysis, of course since I’m just, well, guessing at all of this.  But it’s happening often enough to appear as a distinct trend.  Not a whole lot of meek men, or elderly whose times have passed.  Not many women and the kids are consciously aggressive.  It’s the men, and not all men, just a large majority of those who I encounter with this speed-up thing.  Lots of big trucks.  Maybe coincidence.

Just seems like it’s a subconscious reaction to a perceived affront to ones dominant position, being passed on the road.

If anything, it’s a new thing to think about.