Well, seeing the Chris Robinson Brotherhood at The Cellar Door in Visalia was an absolutely KILLER good time, ESPECIALLY for a mere $15. It could have been BETTER in some ways, but come on…fifteen fucking dollars, y’know? Just to start with the “bad” shit, to get it out of the way and make everybody shit their pants in joy—nobody reads my blogs for any GOOD, UPBEAT, JOYOUS, SUNSHINE-UP-YOUR-ASS BULLSHIT anyway, now do they?—the three MAIN bummers were:
(A) I couldn’t browbeat ONE STUPID FUCKING FRIEND into going along.
(B) I couldn’t get hammered as hell drinking Heineken and other good beer.
(C)The band didn’t play NEARLY the setlist I would’ve liked.
Obviously, reason (B) is just immature, crybaby horseshit to begin with, and it’s not as though I’m NOT accustomed by now to going places—concerts, casinos, fishing trips—where I would MUCH RATHER be shotgunning brewskis and gulping tequila with buddies instead of settling for fucking Sparkletts bottled water. So fuck reason (B) anyway. Reason (A) is just natural, isn’t it? Concerts are ALWAYS better with friends along, for reasons too many to list— to help remember things you DON’T remember until it’s brought up to you (“Hey, remember that badass riff in “Hard To Handle”? That shit was COOL!”), to help remember where you parked the goddamned car, as wingman while you’re trying to talk the chick in the tight leather pants into wrapping her tits around your cock (well, give you a phone number at least), as backup when the aforementioned chick’s plastered boyfriend finds out that you’re trying to give his girlfriend a gynecological exam 2 feet away from him, etc. But reason (C) was the biggest problem by far, and IT didn’t even bother me too much.
Although I’m obviously pretty fond of the band, you can’t really classify me as the world’s BIGGEST Black Crowes fan. There’s a whole string of their albums that I’ve never even HEARD or only heard once or twice long ago (LIONS, BY YOUR SIDE, THREE SNAKES AND ONE CHARM, AMORICA) and don’t even REMEMBER hearing. And I knew ZERO of Chris Robinson’s solo work. I just happen to like Robinson’s voice and style of music and was rather excited to get to experience it in an intimate bar setting, which I hoped would sound better than an arena concert sounds to me generally. And it did, thankfully—otherwise I would’ve been REALLY disappointed. I was really amazed when I only recognized ONE song (“Appaloosa” from BEFORE THE FROST…) in the entire 2-hour-plus set but the great sound made all the shit that I didn’t recognize just as enjoyable as what I did. Some were supposed to be new Chris Robinson Brotherhood originals but many of the other patrons seemed to know most of the words to most of the tunes so they must have been older Chris Robinson solo tunes (his first solo album, NEW EARTH MUD, was available for $10 at the door so I grabbed it—it made a better souvenir than the ass-ugly $25 fucking T-shirts did).
I had decided to try my iPod Touch’s video recording ability for the first time here, and I was quite pleasantly surprised AND quite pissed off, too—surprised because, as it turned out, it worked FAR better than I thought it would, mainly in the audio recording department, and pissed because I didn’t try to get more of the show. Due to a number of reasons (such as getting a tired arm from holding the son of a bitch in the air all night, my expectation of a muffled-sounding, unwatchable video, my fear that the battery charge would run out quickly while recording, and the fact that I kept waiting for them to play SOMETHING I fucking recognized) I only recorded fragments of like 3 songs, but when I checked them out on the computer after I got home they sounded MORE than acceptable in terms of audio quality and it didn’t burn up much of the battery’s charge either. Live’n’learn, I guess…next fucking concert I’ll know better.
Of course, the next concert I see probably won’t be in such a cool place. I really liked The Cellar Door when I volunteered to help with my Alpha Gamma Sigma clubmate Donna’s charity concert against child abuse there a few years back (I ended up working the door for 8 fucking hours), and it hasn’t changed any. The room immediately to your right when you first walk in was used as the band’s dressing room or backstage area or whatever the fuck you want to call it—it was where they served up the food during the charity concert. I figured it was probably where the band was hanging out at, especially after I smelled all the burning incense floating out of there every time somebody ran in or out of the room, which was often (another clue that the band was in there). I was standing just outside the room, leaning against a cooler full of wine and beer with my back to the door when the band came out to take the stage—all of a sudden the dude with the Jesus Christ hair who’d just walked past me turns around to say something and it’s Chris: he wasn’t talking to ME, he was talking to his guitar player who was still back in the room. I could’ve shook the dude’s hand or asked for a picture but I decided not to bother him seeing as how I’m not a 16-year-old groupie or some shit.
The crowd was small, relatively well-behaved, and mostly OLD. The average age of an audience member was probably somewhere in between “not old enough for the Guinness Book of World Records but too old to fuck without throwing their back out.” There were a couple of people there that were younger than me, quite a few people that appeared to be about my age, and TONS of AARP members boogeying away. This probably contributed to the crowd’s good behavior—after all, it’s kind of hard to rock out hardcore when you’re worried about breaking your hip or losing your dentures.But I definitely enjoyed the laid-back vibe.
Well, I’ll be looking out for a debut album from the Chris Robinson Brotherhood—from what I heard played that night it will definitely be worth checking out.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Exeter town pride!(?)
I was cruising thru our little dump of a neighborhood strip mall today—well, okay, “dump” may be a bit strong, let’s just say “shoddy, run-down-looking joint”—when it occurred to me that this single block of pus-colored buildings is all that my family (yours truly excluded, of course) ever sees of Exeter. The old, half-assed grocery store (SaveMart) is there, the equally old-and-half-assed auto parts store (AutoZone) and pharmacy (RiteAid) are too, along with the bank they use and all the fast-food joints/restaurants that we frequent. To be entirely accurate, a couple of those fast-food joints/restaurants are across the street at another little strip mall that, while newer, still somehow manages to look like a little red-headed stepbrother to the BIGGER strip mall across the road. However, that doesn’t change the fact that the only part of this city that my family ever sees is the last two blocks on the western edge of town. I always have to tell them when something new happens uptown, like a new business opens or an old one closes or they paint the water tower or build a nice, new granite sign at the cemetery. This is not quite as true of my mom as it is of my dad, because every once in a blue moon she’ll have to go to the post office to mail something or swing by the Exeter School District office to drop off an insurance payment, although generally speaking she just makes ME do it. But that’s basically it.
The only reason it occurred to me was because I was afraid that some people might begin to assume I fucking LIVED there, seeing as how I’m up there several times a day—in fact I can, with utter and complete confidence, predict that I will go up there for milk, some fucking prescription, and some shitty lunch item from Taco Bell (or possibly Mickey D’s), at least, before I even finish this blog. But after that, other things began to strike me, too: things like the very strong belief that some people have about “buying locally” and supporting the community and/or the small businessman instead of supporting the behemoth WalMart or the big-box titans like Home Depot or Costco over in Visalia, and thereby keeping those tax dollars in Exeter (or something like that—I never took economics, and can assure you I would’ve flunked for ditching class even if I HAD taken it). We actually USED to do that…run up to Coast-to-Coast for a paintbrush or the Mercantile for some shells for the .22 so we could go all fucking Iwo Jima on all the vermin squirrels running around here. Or we’d hit V.I.P. Pizza, or Video Zone to rent a flick, all that shit that you’d see in a Rockwell painting, if Rockwell were deranged and took acid. But almost everything in this house comes from Visalia nowadays, and has ever since WalMart opened up 15 or 20 years ago. This is mainly because of my mom: I firmly believe my mom would shop at a store called “WeFlogOurEnslavedChildLaborersAndSupportIslamicTerroristsMart” if she thought she could save five fucking cents on toilet paper there. My mother—the whole family really, including ME, but ESPECIALLY my mother—is basically the small businessman’s nightmare. In fact, some of the local business owners probably have pictures of her with a Hitler mustache drawn on them hanging on their office dartboard (at least I HOPE it’s drawn on, otherwise my mom has a secret life as a male and a Nazi that I know NOTHING about).
Some greasy spoon called Huckleberry’s (breakfast and lunch ONLY—what fucking sense does it make to be CLOSED FOR DINNER? I would’ve thought that restaurants made their biggest profits THEN) opened up at the smaller strip mall: after several months my family went and ate there once and loved it. They then proceeded to bitch up a storm when it closed up shop a few months later. You can’t really seem to explain to them that they have no right to bitch about a place closing down when they only bought like one fucking meal a year there; NO establishment can stay in business if all it’s customers only shopped there once a fucking year. You’ve gotta be more supportive than THAT shit, you know? Some other restaurant, called Yukon Jack’s (no relation to the whiskey that I know of), has already come and gone in the same place, and we NEVER ate there—not even ONCE. Now there’s a Perko’s in there, been there for a couple of months or so, and we haven’t eaten there yet either. It probably speaks volumes that the most successful business in that place is the fucking dialysis clinic that opened up several months ago.
It just seems weird, because my folks used to really spout off about how good a town Exeter was and how glad they were that they lived here. Of course, considering all the surrounding communities (Farmersville, Woodlake, Lindsay, Ivanhoe, etc.), it ain’t like it’s got a lot of competition—the fucking death camp at Buchenwald probably looks like Cape Cod or the Riviera compared with Goshen or Yettem. They’ve also never been a victim of crime that I can recall, although other houses on our street have been, as have I: a $90 pair of shades was stolen out of my truck during the night like 18 years ago or something. But now, every time I start the car in the morning to warm up for 5 fucking minutes while I take a leak, I have to listen to, “Stephen, one of these days that car just ain’t gonna be there anymore when you go back out to leave. You laugh at us and think we’re paranoid now, but it happened to Bobby Sue’s second cousin’s mailman’s ex-wife’s kid just a couple of weeks ago on the other side of town. Things have changed around here.” They act like they’d like to have a home security setup sort of like Will Smith’s in I AM LEGEND, but of course they’re too cheap for THAT shit—a solitary motion light is the tireless guardian of our house. Well, that and enough guns to defeat Moammar Qadhafi stashed in the old man’s closet. Personally, I’d rather LIKE it if somebody tried to break in myself—I’m most curious what it feels like to remove a person’s head with a 12-gauge, and that seems like the only way you could ever find out without going to jail for it…
It’s also rather weird that they never bother to see the town anymore because people ACTUALLY COME HERE JUST TO LOOK AT THE GODDAMNED TOWN nowadays. There’s, like, 15 or 20 murals around town, some depicting the town’s history (which ain’t much…it’s not like there was a Civil War battle here or something) and others depicting…well, whatever, y’know? I mean, there’s a pretty rad WWII one at the Ford place, with a big B-17 or B-25 or something…but most are just boring scenes of everyday life: immigrants picking oranges, Exeter’s first motorcycle pig (sorry, make that “police officer”) on his patrol, etc. But they’re still rather colorful and pleasant to look at, and so there are tours that go thru here and all kinds of shit. And they (my family) ignore all of it, never see any of it.
Christ, I hope I’m not that bored—and BORING—when I get old…okay, older (blow me)…I guess only time will tell.
The only reason it occurred to me was because I was afraid that some people might begin to assume I fucking LIVED there, seeing as how I’m up there several times a day—in fact I can, with utter and complete confidence, predict that I will go up there for milk, some fucking prescription, and some shitty lunch item from Taco Bell (or possibly Mickey D’s), at least, before I even finish this blog. But after that, other things began to strike me, too: things like the very strong belief that some people have about “buying locally” and supporting the community and/or the small businessman instead of supporting the behemoth WalMart or the big-box titans like Home Depot or Costco over in Visalia, and thereby keeping those tax dollars in Exeter (or something like that—I never took economics, and can assure you I would’ve flunked for ditching class even if I HAD taken it). We actually USED to do that…run up to Coast-to-Coast for a paintbrush or the Mercantile for some shells for the .22 so we could go all fucking Iwo Jima on all the vermin squirrels running around here. Or we’d hit V.I.P. Pizza, or Video Zone to rent a flick, all that shit that you’d see in a Rockwell painting, if Rockwell were deranged and took acid. But almost everything in this house comes from Visalia nowadays, and has ever since WalMart opened up 15 or 20 years ago. This is mainly because of my mom: I firmly believe my mom would shop at a store called “WeFlogOurEnslavedChildLaborersAndSupportIslamicTerroristsMart” if she thought she could save five fucking cents on toilet paper there. My mother—the whole family really, including ME, but ESPECIALLY my mother—is basically the small businessman’s nightmare. In fact, some of the local business owners probably have pictures of her with a Hitler mustache drawn on them hanging on their office dartboard (at least I HOPE it’s drawn on, otherwise my mom has a secret life as a male and a Nazi that I know NOTHING about).
Some greasy spoon called Huckleberry’s (breakfast and lunch ONLY—what fucking sense does it make to be CLOSED FOR DINNER? I would’ve thought that restaurants made their biggest profits THEN) opened up at the smaller strip mall: after several months my family went and ate there once and loved it. They then proceeded to bitch up a storm when it closed up shop a few months later. You can’t really seem to explain to them that they have no right to bitch about a place closing down when they only bought like one fucking meal a year there; NO establishment can stay in business if all it’s customers only shopped there once a fucking year. You’ve gotta be more supportive than THAT shit, you know? Some other restaurant, called Yukon Jack’s (no relation to the whiskey that I know of), has already come and gone in the same place, and we NEVER ate there—not even ONCE. Now there’s a Perko’s in there, been there for a couple of months or so, and we haven’t eaten there yet either. It probably speaks volumes that the most successful business in that place is the fucking dialysis clinic that opened up several months ago.
It just seems weird, because my folks used to really spout off about how good a town Exeter was and how glad they were that they lived here. Of course, considering all the surrounding communities (Farmersville, Woodlake, Lindsay, Ivanhoe, etc.), it ain’t like it’s got a lot of competition—the fucking death camp at Buchenwald probably looks like Cape Cod or the Riviera compared with Goshen or Yettem. They’ve also never been a victim of crime that I can recall, although other houses on our street have been, as have I: a $90 pair of shades was stolen out of my truck during the night like 18 years ago or something. But now, every time I start the car in the morning to warm up for 5 fucking minutes while I take a leak, I have to listen to, “Stephen, one of these days that car just ain’t gonna be there anymore when you go back out to leave. You laugh at us and think we’re paranoid now, but it happened to Bobby Sue’s second cousin’s mailman’s ex-wife’s kid just a couple of weeks ago on the other side of town. Things have changed around here.” They act like they’d like to have a home security setup sort of like Will Smith’s in I AM LEGEND, but of course they’re too cheap for THAT shit—a solitary motion light is the tireless guardian of our house. Well, that and enough guns to defeat Moammar Qadhafi stashed in the old man’s closet. Personally, I’d rather LIKE it if somebody tried to break in myself—I’m most curious what it feels like to remove a person’s head with a 12-gauge, and that seems like the only way you could ever find out without going to jail for it…
It’s also rather weird that they never bother to see the town anymore because people ACTUALLY COME HERE JUST TO LOOK AT THE GODDAMNED TOWN nowadays. There’s, like, 15 or 20 murals around town, some depicting the town’s history (which ain’t much…it’s not like there was a Civil War battle here or something) and others depicting…well, whatever, y’know? I mean, there’s a pretty rad WWII one at the Ford place, with a big B-17 or B-25 or something…but most are just boring scenes of everyday life: immigrants picking oranges, Exeter’s first motorcycle pig (sorry, make that “police officer”) on his patrol, etc. But they’re still rather colorful and pleasant to look at, and so there are tours that go thru here and all kinds of shit. And they (my family) ignore all of it, never see any of it.
Christ, I hope I’m not that bored—and BORING—when I get old…okay, older (blow me)…I guess only time will tell.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
The mortality blog
You know, death always hits me weird…
I would admit that nobody really close to me has ever died. Oh, sure…the grandparents, maybe an assorted aunt or uncle, blah blah blah. But a parent? A sibling? An ex-girlfriend that could suck like a Hoover and was actually pretty cool to be around to boot? Never happened. Never lost any particularly close friends, either. So I guess you could say that I really don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about (which seems to be a pretty commonly held sentiment about yours truly anyway). But I just don’t think it affects me the same way that it does most people.
I got the chance again today to find out. I was awakened this morning by a phone call informing me that one of my old friends had died—last night actually, in a motorcycle accident (I’ve known at least two people that have died on those fucking things, as well as one guy who died on a three-wheeler and another guy who died on a quad). My relationship with him, actually, would probably fall somewhere in between acquaintance and friend, though much more towards the friend side of the equation. Though I’d known him for 25 or 30 years, I hadn’t seen him in 3 or 4 years—we just traded the occasional comment on each other’s Facebook page. But obviously, it still sucks…and I will miss him. Big time. And he was much, much closer to a couple of my best friends than he was to me.
The first thing that hits me is guilt, in a way. I suppose some of it could be a form of so-called “survivor’s guilt”—you know, “why do I get to live on and he doesn’t?” Though this is supposed to mainly (if not exclusively) strike people who have been through intense shit together—like, say, hostage situations or military service in times of war or even just automobile accidents—where one survives and one doesn’t, I think it happens a lot more often than that. Put it this way: if a computer, or maybe Mr. Spock (the actual Leonard Nimoy might do in a pinch), sat down and read a summary of our lives—just how together our lives were, what we’d accomplished thus far, number of lives affected, possible future existence, all that shit—and had to pick one of us to go, most definitely it’d be me. This is not some bullshit “it should have been ME!” statement, nor do I wish to change places with him…it just makes you ponder shit, get all existentialist and whatnot. Was it “his time” in God’s eyes, or was the whole thing just a freak accident?
There’s another kind of guilt that comes with it, too. I’m not a “weeper”—never have been. This has always made me feel terrible, like maybe I lack a soul or something. I can always tell how difficult it is for the person passing the news along, how they try in vain to sugarcoat it or something in the fear that I won’t be able to handle it and will snap like a bungee cord made in China, immediately requiring a straitjacket and a sedative to contain my grief. I feel like an absolute asshole when they finally break the news and I simply go “huh!” in a detached, “Imagine that!” sort of way. The same sort of reaction that most people have when you tell them that the average sea turtle swims 500 miles a year or some other boring factoid. I can’t even begin to count how many times I’ve been at a funeral and nearly blew a blood vessel or shit my Fruit of the Looms just trying to force a few goddamned tears out of my ducts. But it almost never happens. Instead, I just stand there looking like I’m about halfway between bored and pissed, like some poor dude in the mall who can’t get his wife to move her ass and finish shopping so he can get home and watch the big game or something.
But it does hit me…it becomes this ever-present black cloud, this thing that nags at the back of your mind at all times. Kinda like the feeling you get when you’re afraid you’re going to get some bad test results back from the doctor. And it’s always there. Oh, it goes away eventually, of course…but it takes several days. Tomorrow morning may well be the worst of it…that would be my guess. That first morning when you really have to remind yourself that you really have awakened already and it’s not all just weird shit from last night’s dream. But for the next few days at least, I’m continually going to find myself snapping out of some trance where I realize that I’ve been staring into space for 10 fucking minutes and just…pondering. And remembering.
The final little bout with guilt that I have to endure comes from my own cynical, hardheaded assholishness (fuck you, it’s a word because I SAID so)…whenever I hear a news report like the one they did on my buddy, I just instantly write the victim off as a probable piece of shit, anyway. I analyze the situation, think “Hmmm…eleven’o’clock at night, motorcycle, speeding…well, you play with matches, you get burned, don’t you? 'Bye-bye, dumbshit. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way into whatever afterlife you’ve earned.” But every once in a while, a little reminder—occasionally a very harsh reminder at that—comes my way to let me know that I have no fucking right at all to be such a judgmental prick, and also to remind me that many other lives are affected and not just the stiff in the morgue’s.
I have no idea what’s up with a funeral just yet. I mean, that’s pretty obvious, seeing as how the whole affair just happened 24 hours ago. I simply mean, I don’t know if he’s to be buried in the city he’s living in now, or if he wanted to come back to this place, or if he’s to be cremated, or what. If he’s to be buried there, then I’ll most likely miss the funeral. But if it’s to happen HERE, then I’ll most definitely go.
Rich, it was real, brother. RIP…
I would admit that nobody really close to me has ever died. Oh, sure…the grandparents, maybe an assorted aunt or uncle, blah blah blah. But a parent? A sibling? An ex-girlfriend that could suck like a Hoover and was actually pretty cool to be around to boot? Never happened. Never lost any particularly close friends, either. So I guess you could say that I really don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about (which seems to be a pretty commonly held sentiment about yours truly anyway). But I just don’t think it affects me the same way that it does most people.
I got the chance again today to find out. I was awakened this morning by a phone call informing me that one of my old friends had died—last night actually, in a motorcycle accident (I’ve known at least two people that have died on those fucking things, as well as one guy who died on a three-wheeler and another guy who died on a quad). My relationship with him, actually, would probably fall somewhere in between acquaintance and friend, though much more towards the friend side of the equation. Though I’d known him for 25 or 30 years, I hadn’t seen him in 3 or 4 years—we just traded the occasional comment on each other’s Facebook page. But obviously, it still sucks…and I will miss him. Big time. And he was much, much closer to a couple of my best friends than he was to me.
The first thing that hits me is guilt, in a way. I suppose some of it could be a form of so-called “survivor’s guilt”—you know, “why do I get to live on and he doesn’t?” Though this is supposed to mainly (if not exclusively) strike people who have been through intense shit together—like, say, hostage situations or military service in times of war or even just automobile accidents—where one survives and one doesn’t, I think it happens a lot more often than that. Put it this way: if a computer, or maybe Mr. Spock (the actual Leonard Nimoy might do in a pinch), sat down and read a summary of our lives—just how together our lives were, what we’d accomplished thus far, number of lives affected, possible future existence, all that shit—and had to pick one of us to go, most definitely it’d be me. This is not some bullshit “it should have been ME!” statement, nor do I wish to change places with him…it just makes you ponder shit, get all existentialist and whatnot. Was it “his time” in God’s eyes, or was the whole thing just a freak accident?
There’s another kind of guilt that comes with it, too. I’m not a “weeper”—never have been. This has always made me feel terrible, like maybe I lack a soul or something. I can always tell how difficult it is for the person passing the news along, how they try in vain to sugarcoat it or something in the fear that I won’t be able to handle it and will snap like a bungee cord made in China, immediately requiring a straitjacket and a sedative to contain my grief. I feel like an absolute asshole when they finally break the news and I simply go “huh!” in a detached, “Imagine that!” sort of way. The same sort of reaction that most people have when you tell them that the average sea turtle swims 500 miles a year or some other boring factoid. I can’t even begin to count how many times I’ve been at a funeral and nearly blew a blood vessel or shit my Fruit of the Looms just trying to force a few goddamned tears out of my ducts. But it almost never happens. Instead, I just stand there looking like I’m about halfway between bored and pissed, like some poor dude in the mall who can’t get his wife to move her ass and finish shopping so he can get home and watch the big game or something.
But it does hit me…it becomes this ever-present black cloud, this thing that nags at the back of your mind at all times. Kinda like the feeling you get when you’re afraid you’re going to get some bad test results back from the doctor. And it’s always there. Oh, it goes away eventually, of course…but it takes several days. Tomorrow morning may well be the worst of it…that would be my guess. That first morning when you really have to remind yourself that you really have awakened already and it’s not all just weird shit from last night’s dream. But for the next few days at least, I’m continually going to find myself snapping out of some trance where I realize that I’ve been staring into space for 10 fucking minutes and just…pondering. And remembering.
The final little bout with guilt that I have to endure comes from my own cynical, hardheaded assholishness (fuck you, it’s a word because I SAID so)…whenever I hear a news report like the one they did on my buddy, I just instantly write the victim off as a probable piece of shit, anyway. I analyze the situation, think “Hmmm…eleven’o’clock at night, motorcycle, speeding…well, you play with matches, you get burned, don’t you? 'Bye-bye, dumbshit. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way into whatever afterlife you’ve earned.” But every once in a while, a little reminder—occasionally a very harsh reminder at that—comes my way to let me know that I have no fucking right at all to be such a judgmental prick, and also to remind me that many other lives are affected and not just the stiff in the morgue’s.
I have no idea what’s up with a funeral just yet. I mean, that’s pretty obvious, seeing as how the whole affair just happened 24 hours ago. I simply mean, I don’t know if he’s to be buried in the city he’s living in now, or if he wanted to come back to this place, or if he’s to be cremated, or what. If he’s to be buried there, then I’ll most likely miss the funeral. But if it’s to happen HERE, then I’ll most definitely go.
Rich, it was real, brother. RIP…
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