Oh, the places you'll go...

Yeah, so, did anybody make it and hold their breath for the whole six hours? If you did, I've got a couple of shiny nickels you can place over your eyes like in Greek myths.
Right, so, I've been trying to come up with some sort of theme for this blog, you know, something to tie it all together. I mean, there are news blogs, and, while I respect journalists and quasi-journalists and wannabe-journalists for their drive for the truth, justice and the Internet way, I've been there and done that, so no thanks. I could do the Rosie O'Donnell thing and give little spurts of AADD-esque thoughts without any punctuation, but I like periods, commas, and the occasional semi-colon. Plus, I like to be a little more coherent than "scooby doo was funny that dog could solve crimes i like pie." That’s just not the road I'm willing to take. A friend of mine is doing a blog where he talks about how everything in his life seems to flicker, a theme that I'm sure he'll either soar like an eagle with or just forget in a few days (No offense, good buddy. I got faith in you, but I also know you, so it's like weighing a witch and a duck to check for floatability. And if you can figure out if that makes sense, please tell me). So what should I do?
No, you don't get to answer, but thanks for wanting to play. Too bad I didn't invest in any parting gifts other than occasionally scathing wit.
Well, I could do something that relates to the name of this blog: Final Jump. Now, I'm pretty positive that no one has even found this blog yet, so no one has clicked the link explaining what the name means. The term Final Jump actually comes from (are you ready?) a Star Wars novel. I never read this particular novel all the way through, the story and prose just didn't interest me. But, a long time ago (God, with Star Wars geeks, using that phrase always makes someone ask "In a galaxy far, far away?" And I must look at them and go, "You know, everyone else here had the decency not to say it, what gives you the right to be so horribly unfunny?" That's the tip of the day, always answer a stupid question with an insulting question. Nothing works better), my uncle wanted to play a Star Wars pen and paper role-playing game where he was a bounty hunter who flew a Lambda-class shuttle that was painted black and called Final Jump. The idea never panned out (thank God, because I think one of the gimmicks involved cutting in on future captives' comm units and blaring Black Sabbath's "Iron Man"), but the name and its meaning always stuck with me. See, in one Star Wars novel, the author said that Final Jump was spacer/fighter pilot slang for death ("I guess I'll be taking one last hyper jump for this suicide mission. It'll be my final jump"). Now, even though no other author ever once used this phrase, it stuck in Star Wars obscure lore until it reached me, and I kind of adopted it for myself.
Anyway, while I guess I could use death as a theme for this blog (it would go with the decor), I'm gonna veto that one, just shove it right out the airlock. I don't really think about death all that much, which I consider a healthy thing, and I think it's gonna stay that way.
So, what's next? There's sarcasm, but that's not really a theme. I guess I could make it one, but it would mainly be this split-personality, one side of me vs. another side sort of thing. Nope, not gonna board that crazy train (Ha, see, that's a reference back to the "Iron Man" thing, and...yeah, it's crap, I know. No, you shut up.). (Side note: I think I need to add parenthesis to that punctuation list)
I think what I'm going to do is with each post, or the ones that I actually have time to do so in, I'm going to pick apart whatever previous Song of the Post was. I'll talk about the lyrics, any hidden meanings that I've found, any personal experiences that I feel like sharing, if it makes me feel any certain way, that sort of thing. It's going to be mostly 60s-80s classic rock, so if you're waiting on the edge of your seat for an analysis of the latest Jennifer Lopez, Ashlee Simpson, or Eminem track, you're gonna need to look somewhere else. So, let's see how this pans out>
The last SotP (and, yes, for those Star Wars nerds out there, I know that SotP is the abbreviation for Timothy Zahn's Specter of the Past, but it's not like he owns those four letters) was Dobie Gray's Drift Away. He did it long before whatever shitty band decided to cover it and fuck it up, please don't excuse my French. While this is off topic slightly, I am going to address these bands that decide to cover a song just for the hell of it. The group that just redid Drift Away and the woman who decided to cover Carole King's It's Too Late need to do more than just remake the song down to the last detail. My God, I heard the cover of ITL the other day and wondered why the person wasted their time. It's exactly the same, right down to the little bit of scat that King does during the instrumental part. Exactly the same fucking song. Don't cover a song if you're going to do that. Do what Jimi Hendrix did with Dylan's All Along the Watchtower and what Joe Cocker did with The Beatles' With a Little Help from My Friends. Be amazingly original. You might fuck it up, but you might make something beautiful and wonderful, and most of all, it's yours. It I say the above song titles to someone on the street, do you think that Dylan and The Beatles are the bands that come to mind? More than likely not. If you are original, even if you mess it up (Madonna, I'm looking in your direction for that version of American Pie), it is still yours.
Right, okay, back to Dobie Gray. This song seriously reminds me Otis Redding's Sitting on the Dock of the Bay, so much so that I can see the two sitting on the same bench, sharing their tales. Gray talks about how he's confused, thinks that he's wasting time, but the music is what sustains him. I have days like this, where everything has just been shit, but I sit in my car and one song, just one tune, clears away all that mess and makes me feel better, even if it's just for a moment. That's what this song is about: the power of music. While Redding's narrator finds something of import in ships on the sea, Gray's song is all about the salvation that music itself offers. Some may say that Gray's song is meta, that it is about the form that it is taking, like metafiction is someone writing a novel where the main character is writing a novel (Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys is the best example that I can come up with, both for its humor and its honesty). Gray's song is about the power of song, so I guess it can be seen as meta. I think it is really poetry, much like a blog is meant to be: Whoever wrote it, be it Gray or someone else, they have poured onto a page their feelings about music and how it makes them feel, much like I am doing here. Meta is generally associated with the process of making that thing: poetry about writing poetry, television about making television. Drift Away is music about how music makes the author feel. That's not meta; that's poetry. So for all those poetriphobics or whatever out there, stay away from Drift Away.
Well, that was rather painless, and somewhat educational, even for me. Wow, how crappy is that, huh? Well, next time, I'll address the SotP and, if nothing else strikes my fancy, I'll probably strike out at all the shitty Star Wars merchandise that's coming out before Episode III hits. I mean, Darth Tater? What the fuck is the deal with that?

Song of the Post: Ah, one of my favorites. "Anyway, my coffee's cold / And I'm gettin' told / That I gotta get back to work."