Posts

Posted on

studded belt like a vacancy sign

Free HBO; ice.Morning.

It’s Tuesday night internet and, I swear, I had the best of intentions… I swear.

Someday it would be interesting to chart the frequency of my posts here on sounds familiar against the density of my work calendar for a given week.  I’d be willing to be there’s a high correlation between days and weeks when I’m absolutely slammed at work and those which go void of writing here.  Not because I write at work, but more because my brain gets overwrought during the day and isn’t readily available for writing at night.  If I had I had it my way I’d still be posting every day.

I did write some over this extended weekend, so I’ll go ahead recycle that as content now first:

Monday morning and I’m not at work.  The weather outside is unbelievable, and I’ve already been productive enough with the weekend and general, and my scant waking hours today, that I’m deserved a tiny break.  So the house is wide open and Jesse Colin Young’s “Song for Juli” shuffled up on the iPod (I had to take a break from my marathon Beatles tear, read more about that below).

I wrote last week about the Beatles’ albums leaking in their new remastered format, and since then I’ve been listening non-stop, analyzing and enjoying (but mostly enjoying).  The remasters came down in FLAC (as any self-respecting lossless files would), but in order to get them on the iPod they needed to be transcoded to ALAC (Apple lossless) format – the only lossless codec the iPod understands.  Since transcoding removes all the song metadata, I have to re-tag all the resultant files.  After all that, I was finally able to load the lossless files on the iPod, in their full sonic glory, and lock myself away in an imaginary room with headphone walls and a nice wide stereo image painted across my brainscape.  And, no sooner had I got the stereo remasters loaded on the iPod then did the mono remasters leak.

So there I was, Saturday, home by myself (well, Keaton is napping).  I’d just converted and loaded the entire mono and stereo boxsets onto the iPod, and it was time to play them loud.  I started with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in it’s original mono.  How the bass didn’t wake up Keaton I have no idea… but the plodding bottom-end of “Fixing A Hole” has never sounded more in-the-room.  I can hear nuances in the double-tracked vocals on the White Album moreso than ever before.  Makes me want to hear it on an audiophile rig (which my setup is not).  In the forums online, there are already fierce (for online forums, at least) debates ongoing about what sounds better and what sounds worse.  But, for me, one listen to “I Saw Her Standing There” at top-volume seals the deal… I swear I could be hearing a studio playback.

Monday this past three-day weekend Sharaun took Keaton for the morning so I decided to go for a bike ride.  I did a short five mile loop and made a stop at the local REI to pickup some supplies for the month’s-end backpacking trip in the Columbia River Gorge.  It was supposed to be just a ten mile loop there and back, but while there I got a text from some friends saying there were headed into town for a ride and wondered if I’d want to join them.  After a texting volley I found out they’d be arriving about four miles from where I was in about twenty minutes – perfect.  I rode to meet them, then did a ten mile loop around a local lake (this area is so fantastic for riding… trails everywhere and you hardly ever have to be on the road).  Home again after that and before I knew it I’d been gone for three and a half hours and ridden twenty-eight miles.  The day was so fantastic weather-wise, I felt like I could just go forever and ever.

I guess I’m outta here now.  Nothing more has come in the 40min I’ve stared at this page.  Goodnight y’allz.

Posted on

waiting on music again

Loose lips...Man I’m glad it’s Thursday night.  Tomorrow (today as you’re reading) is Friday; three-day weekend come on.

Today after work I ran around like a newly-headless chicken, running an errand downtown for a buddy and then trying to get back in time to join some friends for the evening… but traffic and frustration and general lateness made me forgo that friend time.  I rolled into the garage around 8pm and decided that, having had a burrito as big as my arm for lunch today, I probably didn’t need any dinner.

With no dinner and no friends and just Keaton and I at the crib, I decided to put on some music and hang out.  Fired up the internet and discovered that, lo and behold, the Beatles stereo remasters had leaked in pristine FLAC and the torrent was marked for freeleech.  There goes 3+ gigs on the iPod.  I’m fifteen hours late to the swarm; but amazingly there’s only two seeds.  No sooner had I jumped into the fray than was I at the top of leech pack (glacial seed so closing in on 5,000-strong now).  This is the Titanic of torrents… smashing all records.   Hopefully I can have them all converted to ALAC and loaded on the iPod for some work listening tomorrow.  Woohoo.

And now the songs are just dribbling in… one by one I’m getting to hear the remasters.  I started with the ones that’ve hit 100%.  “I Am the Walrus” was one of the first.  Oh man this sounds good.  I hope it all sounds like this.  Holy crap I just put “All You Need Is Love” on… the separation and clarity is amazing.  Strings.  John.  Drums.   For kicks, I spun the 80s CD mix in pieces alongside… no comparison.  I can’t wait to listen to Pepper once all the way through.  I don’t have the patience to tolerate the audiophile rantings about the horn being too “up front” or “bright” in the new mix of so-and-so-whatever… this sounds way better than the ’87 stuff to me; limited, compressed, whatever.  Sounds spectacular.

Getting late and I have nothing to do aside from wait for this album to finish.  Guess I’ll queue up an episode of History Detectives and practice my patience.

Goodnight.

Posted on

requires adult supervision

Back when things were things.Happy Tuesday world.

At some point early along in my adolescent life, both my mother and father had to work during the summer. I think this was the summer between my 6th and 7th grade years of junior highschool.  That would’ve made me about thirteen or so, and my brother around ten.  6th grade was my first year in Florida, so I hadn’t yet built up any real network of friends, and I entered that first summer after my first year at junior high without much prospects for socialized fun aside from interacting with my brother.  And, since it’d been he and I up until that point anyway… I don’t think it bothered me too much.  Anyway, being that our folks were working during the day, this meant that he and would be home alone during the day.

Well, it meant we would’ve been home during the day… had my parents not got us a babysitter.

That’s right; here I am with thirteen long years of life experience… and, in my mind, solidly qualified to care not only for myself, but also for my brother (should the need arise).  My parents, however, saw it differently.  I remember feeling insulted when my mom told us she’d hired a sitter to come over during the days. I can imagine my teenage brain reeling; what would my (non-existent) friends say?  How would I explain this (to David the Gnome)?  But, fight it as I might, they were going through with it. Looking back, thinking about things as a parent, I can see the desire to have some adult supervision for a thirteen year old punk and his ten year old brother.  I mean, I wasn’t setting forest fires or stealing Now and Laters yet, but I did have that teenage raskishness about me.  Anyway, in the end it turns out that our last summer of being babysat made for some good memories… so maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.

The first babysitter I remember was a pixie-like college-age girl; short blond hair, very pale, and tiny like a compressed spring, a gymnast.  I don’t remember her name, but I do remember (or rather, the thirteen year old in me remembers) that she wasn’t particularly attractive.  However, since thirteen year old boys are notorious for having ridiculously high standards, I’m sure that unless she looked like Alyssa Milano from Who’s The Boss I’d think she was dogmeat.

Anyway, the one thing I remember about this babysitter was her taste in music.  She was deep into what I know now as the “Madchester” scene, and I recall her listening to things like Candy Flip’s cover of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and some Happy Mondays stuff.  I’ll never forget sitting in the passenger seat as she drove us to the mall one afternoon, watching her work her hand in rhythmic waves to the beat of that crazy Beatles cover… I thought that was so cool.  As I got older, and began researching the musical trends of my youth (as all good music nerds at some point do), I realized that she was actually pretty cutting-edge at the time… Stone Roses, Inspiral Carpets… pretty cool.

The next babysitter (not sure if we drove the first one away or she could only do part of the summer) was completely different.  A big-haired party girl, she spent most of her time “watching” us lounging around the pool in the backyard in a skimpy bikini.  Truth be told, I likely kept a much better eye on her that summer than she did on me; it had to be at least 2:1.  Oh yeah man, she must have been about nineteen and, to me, she was masturbation incarnate.  Again, I can’t seem to remember her name, but I remember her reeking of cheap teenage perfume and hairspray.  What’s more, whereas our first sitter treated me appropriately, as a thirteen year old boy – this babysitter saw in me a burgeoning young adult, and interacted with me more like a peer.  To me, this was amazing, and likely did wonders to boost my self confidence in the psychological long-run.  In fact, I can remember most distinctly one afternoon when she called to talk to my mother.

After telling her I’d go get my mom, but before I actually could, her raspy voice came through the phone, “Hey, guess what I did last night?”  Holy crap… this girl was talking to me… asking me a question like we were about to have an honest-to-God conversation or something.  My heart raced, my brain ached for the appropriate response… “What,” I asked, trying to sound like I talked to incredibly hot nineteen year old girls on the phone all the time.

“I went to see 2 Live Crew down in Miami.”

My mind raced, I knew something about this… I’d followed the recent national drama around 2 Live Crew on the MTV news, I’d even listened to their debut offering on Luke Skyywalker records back before I left California (how cool was I!?).  Bottom line: if I responded right, I stood a chance at being relevant here.

I asked her about the performance, did the cops show up?, how crazy was it?, did they do “Throw the Dick?”  She proceeded to tell me how wild the show was, how there were girls taking their tops off and, yes, the cops did come (I’m not sure if this was the famous show where the band was arrested or not).  And thereafter that minute and a half marked the most engaging conversation I’d had with a female in my post-pubescent life.  Here I was, a barely-teenager talking about stuff I really didn’t have much clue about, and doing best to discover my own game before I knew what game even was.  And I did it, too.  We talked for a bit before I handed the phone over to my mom; I handled it with aplomb.

Ah… that blissfully empowering memory almost makes me forget the teenage shame of once rummaging through her duffel bag in search of her thong…

Funny, I guess both of those babysitter memories involve music.  What do ya know.  Anyway, I think we may even have had one more sitter over the course of those three months, but she must have been rather unremarkable in the end.

Dear Lord I wrote!  Call the papers.

OK, before I go, I wanted to pass along this thread I saw on reddit the other day.  Y’know, we all drew that thing in 6th grade too… it’s like some vast international mind-meld or something.  Crazy.

Goodnight.

Posted on

sorry guys… i ain’t got it

Ho hum.Happy another summer week everyone.

Writing has, as you’ve no doubt noticed, not been coming easy these past few weeks.  Our evenings have been booked moreso than usual, weeknight or not, and I just haven’t had time nor mind to sit down and get something proper knocked out each night.  I’m trying to not let it get to me, but I do enjoy writing and get a tad down when I’m not able to post regularly.

But what of us?  Sharaun and I have been out stimulating the economy… willfully hemorrhaging money as we work on some small upgrades to our modest piece of the American dream.  We’re doing hardwood floors in the house, and have been out shopping for some select pieces of furniture.  We bought most of what we have now right when we moved to California nine years ago, and some of it is beginning to show its age.  Among the other projects and upgrades: the TV is going up onto the wall, with a small piece of furniture below for all the AV goodies (finally get rid of those wire Sharaun hates so much); new dining room table (with room for more chairs); and ripping up the carpet in our master bathroom to put down tile (who puts carpet in a bathroom?).  With the new car Obama bought us, it’s like our family is a spending machine.  Yikes.

Tonight the weather cooled down a bit, enough for us to consider, and ultimately go through with, a trip down to the “ice cream and sprinkles” place (what Keaton calls it).  Just a stone’s throw from the house, it’s one of those frozen yogurt places that’s all the rage… y’know the kind with a toppings bar full of candy and fruit and whatnot.  Keaton loves the place, getting to pour and create her own treat.  Her typical concoction is gummi bears, fruity pebbles, and sprinkles over vanilla yogurt.  We like taking her down there because it’s a nice family walk and a good way to get out of the house for bit and get some fresh air.

Man, there’s so much I should be writing about… but I just don’t have the chops for it lately.  Goodnight.

Posted on

a place where I is

Don't abide it.Monday night.

I’m falling asleep in my head.

You know the feeling?  Somewhere in the back of my brain, I’m already asleep.  There’s a dense, heavy rock in my skull, and it’s taking up valuable neural space I could be using to produce real-time cogent thought.  Except, I can’t; because of that sleepy rock taking up all the room.  Even if I shake my head around the rock won’t go away.  I know this means I should just give up on the evening and hit the sack; but I’m stubborn and American and, I don’t know if you heard, but we do what we want.  What?

I think I’ll go out to the woods somewhere and find a place where no one is. Through the grip of my hands and the ache of my back I’ll turn that place from a place where no one is into a place where I is. I’ll maybe dig a hole in the ground, reinforce it, and live like a hobbit. With little windows in the side of my mound-home that let in the sunlight and keep out the rain. It would smell like earth and woodsmoke inside. Or I could build a house on a platform up a tree, perched above the wilderness. There’d be a beautiful evening vista, maybe mountains and a river. It would be full of breezes and fresh air and would stand strong against the winter storms. I could take my family there; maybe to a cabin built hard against a lake, with a water wheel. We could live inside and sleep bundled up in patchwork quilts Sharaun makes out of scraps of last year’s workclothes. We could eat fresh fish and maybe wild turkey. Burn candles. Sit on the porch in rocking chairs.

Is this so much to ask?

As a young teenager, I had really bad acne.  For about two years, all through 7th and 8th grades of junior highschool, I suffered.  No, not suffered like so many around the world starving or bearing the brunt of social injustice… but the teenage kind of “suffering” caused by… pimples.  It was bad enough that even my best buddy Kyle would sometimes give me crap about my face, since he was blessed, at that age, with smooth unmarred skin.  On the whole, I didn’t let the acne bother me too much… I think I was young enough that it wasn’t the end of my social universe.  But I did hate it.  I hated it.

Sometime during the apex of my affliction, one of those lifelong kind of memories was burned into my brain:  I was laying on the couch in the living room one evening; my folks were watching TV while I rested, and obviously thought I’d fallen asleep. But, as I lay there, awake with eyes closed, I listened-in on their conversation about their sleeping child.  “His acne is really bad,” lamented my Mom.”  “Yes, it is,” said Dad.  Mom continued, “I remember how bad it was when I was his age; it must really be hard for him… I just wish it would clear up.”

The conversation continued, but the sheer pity expressed in my Mom’s voice flat-out sunk my heart.  My parents were talking about me like some terminally ill patient.  Condemned to be glimpsed through my wretched veil, apparently, they mourned for me.  Talk about a terrible conversation for a kid to hear; a real self-esteem torpedo.  I don’ t think I’ll ever forget overhearing that conversation.  Hurting themselves, feeling the hurt I had myself, I heard my folks’ personal suffering for their child’s condition.  And that, people, is what parenting is all about.

I didn’t write well, that rock of sleep is dominating… I know this could be better.  I can’t find the phrases.  Goodnight.

Posted on

same old stuff

Turning upside down.Monday.

The weekends are never long enough; this one was no exception.  Despite being jam-packed with activity, it still managed to feel too short by half.

The weather cooled off significantly Sunday, so much so that, after church, I opened the house wide to get the fresh air in.  After reneging on what would’ve been my second kids’ birthday party of the weekend, Sharaun took Keaton off and left me to the breezy Sunday afternoon.  After a nice sandwich, I settled down on the couch for a long nap while the iPod provided background.  But, that’s not why I started this paragraph.  In fact, I wrote it to talk about the weather and how it’s turning (which isn’t really happening yet, but today’s cooling got the ball rolling) gets my brain turning to the Fall.  My favorite season; Fall.

This morning Sharaun called from Ross, “Hey,” she said, “They have this big animatronic witch here, she stirs a smoking cauldron and you can speak through her with a wireless microphone.  It looks pretty cool and expensive, but they have it on sale for $60.”  I was vaguely interested, but having not seen the prop myself not quite enough to recommend a $60 purchase.  Then, later that day, after checking the mail, a Halloween costume catalog arrived.  In the catalog Sharaun found the very same witch she’d seen earlier at Ross, but retailing for $230.  Being able to see the thing in the catalog, I realized it’s actually pretty dang cool, and that $60 is a pretty hefty discount from a $230 pricetag.  So, after dinner we stopped by Ross and picked her up.  Could be an easy “gimme” prop for the year… but I still think I’m going to try and build something.  Buying props already…

Ahhh… who am I kidding.  I’ve got nothing more to write.  Good weekend, busy week, same old stuff.

Goodnight.

Posted on

two entries on the week

Close to the edge.Two entries on the week.  That’s not so good.

Sitting here listening to Yes’ Close to the Edge, one of those albums that’s about as close to a perfect album as there’ll likely ever be. Up there with Dark Side of the Moon and other luminaries, it just never gets old or ceases to be fascinating in every little note, downbeat, or Anderson-dominated harmony. If you don’t have this album, your collection is sorely lacking. Maybe one day I’ll put together a list of my top-ten “essential” albums or something; that would be totally fun and interesting… for me only. Moving on.

Today I got hit by a mini-wave of morning-time malaise… something that I’m unaccustomed to as I’m usually quite the morning person. I went through my well-rehearsed routine: Waking; heading to the water closet to evacuate and read, in order, CNN, MSNBC, the local California paper, and paper local to where we grew up in Florida; saying a small prayer of thanks for the things I have, a smaller one asking forgiveness for some of the more ridiculous things I’ve done to put those things in jeopardy, and another one as a catchall for all those among humankind who hurt and have needs (with age, these prayers, you see, don’t seem like just so much soliloquy to me anymore); stripping for the shower; dressing post-cleansing; and heading out the door after kisses for Sharaun and Keaton.

At some point in this daily dance I was struck by a gloomy thought: This is what I always do, and this is what I’ll be doing for a long time to come. Really, it shouldn’t be a gloomy thought… but this morning it seemed that way. While I consider myself far from a person prone to depression, for a flash there today I felt a little “locked-in.”  But, the moment passed almost as quickly as it alighted, and (almost) all was right with the world again.

And now I sit here in the evening, like so many other evenings, perched above the keyboard of this machine again.  I changed the music; Close to the Edge played through nearly three times and it was time to shuffle.  Playing a nice Emitt Rhodes track now, pleasant, sounds right.

Well guys, after that… time to talk Halloween.  I’ve been becoming more and more aware that I’m actually a little late getting started on my annual prop project.  I’ve already decided what I’m making this year, and even have the a parts list; I’ve just not started cobbling it all together.  Moreover, I’ve actually been a bit on the fence this year about doing our annual party.  I do this every year though; start thinking we’re too old to throw such a raucous bash, start thinking it might be nice just to decorate the house as usual and save the Halloween fun for trick-or-treating with Keaton instead of having a houseful of drunk folks.  But… in the end, upon sharing my reservations with Sharaun, she always manages to convince me to go ahead with the status quo (she’s nearly done it again this year as well…).

Before I go, I figured I’d link-drop the P4K’s recently finished weeklong feature, “The Top 500 Songs of the 2000s.”  I’ve been enjoying the list immensely; and while I don’t always agree with it (who could, at 500 tracks strong and Pitchfork’s love for freak-folk and electro-dance), I do heartily support some of the choices.  For instance, while I’d liked to have seen Amerie’s “One Thing” crest higher on the list (I love that song so hard), I do agree that Beyoncé’s “Crazy In Love” is definitely in the right sitting atop it (if you wonder why I chose those two to compare, just give each on a listen and you’ll get it).  And, as for the #1 pick… I was surprised.  Interesting, in that Sharaun has always loved that track, even more than I did (or ever have) upon first hearing it waaay back when.  I always knew she had pretty decent taste in music.  No wonder I married her.

Goodnight friends.