Arg!

So, yeah, I'm skipping out on work to write this. Man, if only I got paid to blog, you'd get a lot more posts like last nights.
So, I'm sitting here, reading the campus newspaper (which has always totally sucked) and find myself reading a story headlined "When gas prices go up, drivers pay." Now, not only does that seem like the most common sense headline in the existence of ink, but it's misleading, too. I figured, "Oh, it's about how gas prices are affecting poor, already undernourished college students." No, errrrr. Wrong. It's about how delivery drivers are having to pay more for gas, making some want out of the driving business. The article (which easily could have fit "deliverers" in instead of "drivers") outlines that many are having to use a larger chunk of their tip money to pay for gas. Um, so? Isn't that the point of tipping in the first place, to pay for the gas these kids are out? I'm not giving the guy an extra buck or two because he smiled when he handed me my pizza; I know that the managers don't pay them any extra for gas and I feel like they saved me a trip and some money, so I hand them over a rough approximation of what that might cost. I mean, it's not like a restaurant, where the waiter or tress constantly checks on you, refills your drink, and brings you a nice, cheap mint at the end. If the delivery guy came back every fifteen minutes, asked if the pizza or Chinese food tasted good, gave me a refill on my Coke, and then handed me some peppermint candies, I'd consider giving him a bigger chunk. Instead, all the delivery guy did was drive until he found my place (and sometimes flubs that bit up) and then dropped off my food. So, I give him a bit of gas money. I figure that if his car gets 15 miles to the gallon, he drops off five orders that each give him a buck, that's roughly 30 miles worth of gas he's got in tips. In olden days where gas was nice and cheap, that might have translated into 45 to 60 miles, which is a lot more than he drove before. "Well," you might say, "he's having to pay for insurance and a car payment." And the people stuck making the pizza aren't? Come on. The delivery guy is making a decent wage in the first place, at least the minimum, probably more. On of the examples in this article was that a guy who worked at a place making sandwiches would also fill in when they needed a delivery made and the main driver was out. So this guy would jump in his car, drop it off, and get a tip, something he didn't get while in the restaurant. Now, he needs to put that tip in his tank, which is where it belongs in the first place. That's what I gave it to him for. What reason is he thinking I gave it to him? It ain't because he's pretty, that's for sure. Bottom line: that tip is for gas, nothing more, nothing less. If it has to go in your tank, well duh. If you're blessed and don't have to put it in your tank, think of it as profit. Just don't complain when you're having to use that money for its intended purpose.
Alright, SotP from last time was the wonderfully psychedelic "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)" from a band called First Edition, with lead singer Kenny Rogers. Yep, that Kenny Rogers. The "Know when to hold 'em, / know when to fold 'em" chicken man himself. I think that's one of the great appeals of the song to me: Kenny Rogers, the country music icon, is singing a song that sounds like it was written by Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix during one very "good" weekend. Seriously, just read the lyrics on the internet sometime and try to imagine good ole Kenny singing it. Or you can just pop in a copy of The Big Lebowski and watch the scene where The Dude is having a crazy vision about being small and rolled over by a bowling ball (a great scene that should have you asking "How did they film that part inside the ball?" but almost no one ever does) because Dropped In is on the soundtrack at that point. As for meaning...well, I've never done acid, so I can't even come close to interpreting that mess. Let's just say that it inspires some great imagery.

Song of the Post: "Move me on to any black square, / use me any time you want. / Just remember that the goal / is for us to capture all we want."

Ah, near-raw meat at its finest...

There's this wonderful little burger joint that is quite near my apartment that I just love. I was introduced to it a couple of weeks ago and have been a happy customer ever since. One of the perks is that they'll cook the burger to your liking. So, tonight, I called in my order (medium rare jumbo burger with cheese and sauteed onions and a small fries yum) and was told that it would be ready in 20 minutes. Great, cool, enough time to gas up the car and get there in time for some fresh, hot food. Sure enough, I get there, the owner's wife takes my payment, and I wait. And wait. And wait a little more. It's been at least 35 minutes since I put my order in, so I'm getting slightly agitated. I understand that small businesses don't run like clockwork, but still, there's a margin of error that you can eventually hit the wrong side of. Finally, the owner comes out with my to-go box and says, "I walked back there and saw that it was cooked a little more than you like, so I had them cook another one just right." I stood there dumbfounded for an instant, totally speechless. Wow, not only did they seem to know who I was, making the dining experience a little more personal than I'm used to, but they actually cared enough to make sure that the food was as perfect as possible. My God. My faith in humanity actually rose a notch, a rare thing these days. I responded the only way I could actually think of at the time, with a "Wow, thank you very much," and the knowledge that I would indeed be back several more times by the end of the month. Honestly, when was the last time the guy behind the McDonald's counter told you, "Oh, we remembered that you liked your burgers with extra onions, so here you go. Enjoy." Please. A good friend of mine ordered a cheeseburger plain last night and the guy behind the counter had enough of a grasp on English to understand cheeseburger and nothing else she said. Of course, being the standard American who doesn't like conflict, she wiped off as much of the onion/mustard/ketchup mix as she could and still complained to me about the taste of pickles. While it is entirely probable that I wouldn't have gone to the owner of this burger restaurant and complained my burger was too done, it's very reassuring to me that the merchant was trying to please the customer down to the last detail and that I didn't really have to worry about it.
Since I already brought it up, gas prices really do seem to suck, right? I mean, I put $20 worth of gas in my car tonight and it didn't even fill the tank completely. Do you know how many meals at my favorite local burger place that would have bought? Three. How crappy, right? No. Wrong. Sorry, but thanks for playing. Yeah, gas prices suck. Welcome to the world of balanced consumer prices. Let's face it: the economy? Yeah, it's in shambles. The dollar's down, the everything else is up. Therefore, it takes more dollars to buy a barrel of oil, which trickles down. Then, we take into account that it costs more $55 to buy a barrel of light crude oil. Which, by coincidence, is a 55-gallon drum. Okay, so check this out: from the get go it takes $1 to get one gallon of oil. Now, let's go through the refining process. Without even knowing everything about the process, I'm going to be nice and say that they can strain two gallons of gas out of every gallon of crude oil. Let's be reasonable and say it costs $1 to refine a gallon of oil into two gallons of gas. Next, we have to distribute it. Well, it takes a lot of fuel, and I mean a lot, to transport tanker barges and semi-trucks across vast distances to get to your local gas station. But, to be kind, how about we say that it only costs a quarter of the current price of two gallons of diesel per gallon of gas (one by sea, one by land), which is currently at $2.25. Okay, let's do math. Yea! Fifty cents for the oil, then $.50 to refine it, then $1.12 to ship it to Ma and Pa's Good Ole Gas Stationarium. Hum, by my math, that's $2.12 without anybody making any profit so far. Since we are a capitalist nation (Go Kapitolizm, the new Russia says), everybody should make a profit, right? But, looking out my window and seeing regular unleaded going for $2.18 a gallon, that only leaves 6 cents per gallon for the gas station, the distributor, and the fat execs at the corporate level, plus any state taxes that might apply. Now, I know these figures are off because I'm just talking out of my ass and don't really care enough to research. But let's be honest: is it killing you to pay a little extra. Is the higher price of gas keeping you from doing frivolous things, or buying three extra cheeseburgers a week? Good. Damn, we think because we didn't get much damage in WWII that we are the kings of the world. God, the golden age is over. If Nam didn't snap us out of that delusion, we are a lost cause. What exactly makes America so much better than everyone else that we deserve to be treated like royalty? Isn't that why the forefathers decided to kick Britain's ass eleven score and nine years ago? Because we have the bomb? Nope, sorry, but several other nations belong to that damnible club. Because we keep paying nations "aid" money? Yeah, that's a stupid practice left over from that thing called the Cold War, where we thought the best way to win was to buy off friends, but we see how close a set of friends they really are. Of course, it's not like we don't deserve that sort of reputation. The way we handle international affairs is laughable. We're not saviors to these foreign lands. We're vultures who show up when it benefits us. We're just scouting locations for a new Wal-Mart, oh, but I guess we can get rid of some of those insurgent forces while we're here. I swear, sometimes, I just want to leave, but every now and then there's hope that even though the administration and government screws up, the next generation will make it better, and that the people around me aren't the ones who got us into this position. They're in the boat with me, living in a nation on a downward slope and we've actually got the patriotic sense not to be like rats on a sinking ship. I believe in the nation. I just can't believe in some of the leaders that it elects. I liked Bill. Bill was the kind of president I could party with, and he embraced that image at times (Fleetwood Mac at the inaugural? Oh. My. God. My kind of guy). Yet I cannot stand Bush. The boyish charm that Bill had turned into sleazy arrogance in Bush. And I fear 2008's outcome. Will it be the case of "Meet the new boss, / same as the old boss," or will we venture into some undiscovered country that can bear a new, strong, and honest America? Oy, I'm not sure I'll live to 2008 without getting an ulcer first.
Anyway, gas prices. Yeah, get over yourself America. You didn't save the world from the scourge of communism, you just caused a good chunk of the world to go bankrupt and things have been downhill since then. You think $2.25 or whatever the average is is bad, think about in the early 1970s, when the gas prices, once adjusted for inflation, were much higher. The big reason people complain about gas prices is because wages went up due to inflation while gas prices really didn't, meaning that for years people had "extra" money to throw away on pointless things, like extra orders of fries. And people wonder why there is such a problem with obesity these days.
Alright, enough ranting. The SotP for last time was Alan Jackson's It's Five O'Clock Somewhere, a song that essentially revitalized Jimmy Buffett's career, but caused him to lean toward a money country sound. First, I love the song. It justifies my breaking down at 10 a.m. to have a drink, since in Britain it's just hit 5 p.m., and I like to think that since some of my ancestors probably came from that cold and foggy rock, I should honor their time zone accordingly. Second, the lyrics really do speak to that working-class slob inside me. Today, for instance, my boss asked me to do a project that quite nearly pushed me to the limit and it took everything I had not to say, "I'm outta here. I don't need this shit." All the time that I was doing this shitty-ass (is there any other kind of ass, I must ask?) project, I considered just jumping in my car and driving to Florida, maybe just going all the way to Key West and setting up there. God, what a life it must be there. Hell, I'd work at the Wal-Mart there if it meant I could spend the rest of my life on this little island with its crystal clear water and beautiful women. Maybe I'd even meet Jimmy. Which is the third thing about this song that is great. I mean, what kind of legacy does it demonstrate when someone in a crappy situation wonders "What would Jimmy Buffett do?" A great and wonderful twist on "what would Jesus do?" it's a great mantra for the free spirit in each of us that just wants to tell the boss to shut the fuck up and walk into the local bar to order a hurricane. Plus, there's just something wondrous about how clear and strong Buffett's voice is when he sings that first line. His career started in the late sixties, and here he is, thirty-five years later, and his voice is perfect. During the winter break of my junior year in high school, I found Jimmy Buffett for the first time. My dad always listened to him on long trips, but I always read a book or put on headphones to listen to something else. However, that break, I listened to the great songs that Buffett put out early on: A Pirate Looks at Forty, Son of a Son of a Sailor, Come Monday, and He Went to Paris. These songs were so strong to me that they made me long for this life on the sea, by the ocean, whatever. I wanted to live the lives put down in those songs, even the sad ones. Hell, Buffett said it best in Paris when he sang "Some of it's magic, / some of it's tragic, / but I've had a good life all the way." While Jimmy didn't get pushed all the way out of my music collection, the flame definitely started to flicker out (that one's for you, Dwainker) in my early college years. Books and homework took me away from a longing for singing and sailing. Plus, to me, Margarittaville is a song that gets played on the radio way too much in the summer months, so that kind of killed my buzz. However, one day, Five O'Clock came on the radio and I just ignored it until I barely heard the words "Jimmy Buffett" (Surely no one would say "Jimmy Buffett" in a country song, I thought) and that voice came through so beautifully strong. My longing for the sea came back in that instant. There's just something in his voice that is so sad, so regretful, yet so nostalgic at the same time. A longing for the traditions of a past time, yet knowing that they likely will never be again. Something ancient, yet timeless. Perhaps Jimmy is just Poseidon incarnate. Or Captain Kidd, for that matter. Although, most of the songs that Jimmy did on License to Chill recently just didn't work for me. However, there were three songs on that album that I liked, which will probably come up in future SotPs.
Wow. That's a big post. If you made it to the end, give yourself a round of applause. And if you're wondering, as I was asked last night, when I find time to write so much, I either make time (like now, when I could be sleeping) or I do it while on the job (hey, I might not be able to take a Jamaican vacation of company time, but this is close enough).

Song of the Post: "Someone painted 'April Fool's' / in big black letters on a Dead End sign. / I had my foot on the gas / as I left the road and blew my mind."

To blog or not to blog, that is the cliched, rhetorical question.

So, first, I figure I should welcome my good friend, the Dwainker, to the blog. He's the one who really kind of pitched the whole "let's make blogs" thing to me recently, so you can blame him for getting your daily requirement of sarcasm and rock and/or roll music analysis.
Second, the title for this obviously comes from Billy Shakespeare's work Hamlet, which has been the center of discussion in my Shakespeare class of late. I'm going to go ahead and say that the majority of Shakespeare is crap. I do like Henry V, Much Ado about Nothing, King Lear, and Richard III, with a few things from Hamlet and Macbeth here and there. However, the rest? Yeah, crap. I mean, seriously, why do we pound this into people? "Because they're good stories?" someone might ask. I'm gonna point to Midsummer Night's Dream with the turning of Bottom into an ass who then has sex with Titania as a prime example of shitty plots. "Well, maybe because of the verse? Iambic pentameter is impressive, right?" No, sorry, that just means that Shakespeare had a lot of free time on his hands that could have gone to making better plots. "What about Romeo and Juliet? Everyone loves that one." Nope, sorry, starcrossed lovers just ain't my bag, baby. They get together, marry, and then kill themselves because their families are feuding. Whoop-dee-doo. Plus, I pretty well summed up the play in one sentence. If Shakespeare had done that and left it at that, I'd be happy. Of course, my beef with Shakespeare extends to how he is taught, too. Note that these works are plays, not novels or short stories. Therefore, they should be watched, and only actors should read the plays so they can put together a performance. If you expect high school or even college kids to read these plays for the story, you are going to be sorry. By preparing to perform it, the reader will actually get something more out of the characters. By just reading it to take a test over it, they're just wasting brain cells and time. After all, if all you want is for the student to know the story, give them the Cliff's Notes. No, these are plays. They should be watched and will be easier to comprehend with a human face and voice giving meaning to those verses.
That's kind of where I am in terms of songs. These days, I've been considering how songs are poetry read aloud to music. They often stand alone on paper, but with a voice behind them, they come alive, much like the SotP from last time. Clarence Carter's Slip Away is a poem. I can look up the lyrics on any number of websites and read it and understand it. Yet, when I listen to the song, it works even better for me. I actually have two versions of the song done by Carter in a studio, a very rare thing, but I understand why. The original recording is basically Carter singing the song with a decent range of notes and some sadness. The second recording, which was actually the first one I got, is just amazingly sad. Carter puts real pain and sadness into his voice, which makes it a very powerful piece, and one that I could identify with a lot easier. Oddly enough, this relates back to the Shakespeare rant. I could read the lyrics and get the basic idea behind the song, but that might be a waste of time. I can listen to the first version of the song and get a little bit of emotion, but not much else. Or I can listen to the second version and have a moving experience. I could read Shakespeare and it seem like I'm having teeth pulled. I can watch a high school production where the kids really don't get the whole gamut of emotion behind the piece. Or I can watch Ian McKellen and Kenneth Branagh play the shit out of old Billy and really get the experience as it was intended. I think we all know which I prefer.

Song of the Post: "Gettin' paid by the hour and older by the minute, / My boss just pushed me over the limit. / I'd like to call him something, / but I think I'll just call it a day."

Meh.

Mondays suck. No, seriously, they suck for just about everyone, the only exception that comes to mind are those who love their work (suck-ups) and movie execs, since the final box office figures for the weekend get announced on Mondays and they need to find out who and exactly how much they need to blow in order to get another movie made. So, yeah, Mondays suck.
Ever get that feeling that the universe is building up to a big "Fuck you!"? (Yeah, I'm not sure if that's grammatically correct punctuation, but if you have a problem with it, my response is going to be the same as the quote in question) I mean, sure, there seems to be this karma to my life that gives me crests and valleys, but it just seems like that I get to play the universe's private kickball for the next week. I think the first clue was when I washed all the birdcrap off my car about an hour ago and the only parking spot left in front of my apartment building was under a big tree filled with squawking and likely gorged birds. Ah, universe, you've done it again.
So, to the SotP for last time: for the sadly uneducated out there, that wonderful line is Rod Stewart's You Wear it Well. First off, it's not a clone of Maggie May, Stewert's song from 1970 that is considered his biggest hit, it's something completely different. Maggie May is the story of a boy who has been seduced and placed in a spot that they wish they weren't in. I think the word I associate with it is rue, as in "Oh, Maggie, I rue the day I first saw your face," to paraphrase a line. On the other hand, You Wear it Well is the story of a guy who had a wonderful life with a girl, did something that totally screwed it up (I like that the listener doesn't know what that something is, that way they can insert whatever foul deed they wish. Did he cheat? Did he slap her? Did he call her mama fat?), and now, several years later, he wants to try and get back to her and fix his mistake. Painful regret is just not a strong enough term for what the narrator is feeling, but it's as close as I can come up with right now. So, no matter what someone says, Maggie and You Wear are two totally different tales.
Stylistically, there are differences, too. You Wear it Well is a letter that slowly builds, telling the audience a story while still holding onto the fact that the narrator is speaking to the girl. Also, the fact that it's told as a letter gives the piece a distance that makes it all just a little more heart-wrenching. Maggie is essentially a speech, a monologue, that the narrator straight up tells Maggie one morning. Again, a story is told, but the argument builds, until there is just this heartfelt explosion at the end when the narrator realizes that he honestly wishes he had never seen Maggie's face. This revelation is musically represented by the mandolin solo at the end, a free and joyful piece that is simply astounding. You Wear it Well's representation of regret is instead done by a violin. It's beautifully done because if you listen to the tale as a narrative, the violin doesn't even appear until right when the narrator starts to reminisce about the past in the second or third verse. The violin then carries through, in some fashion, the rest of the song. It weaves regret all through the piece, while Maggie's mandolin only occurs at the end, like payday at the end of a long week. To me, these two songs may sound kind of the same, but they are two very different songs if you actually listen to them and don't just pass one off because it sounds like the other. This is not a case of Oops I Did it Again and One More Time, where you have two virtually identical songs. No, these are two totally different emotional journeys that both need to be traveled before one can just say, "Aw, that other one's just trying to sound like the first one." If you say that, you need to just take a minute and realize that you couldn't be any more wrong.
Yeah, I didn't rip into Darth Tater and his crappy, pandering-to-every-market-available Star Wars peers. Maybe next time, maybe not.

Song of the Post: "What would I give / For just a few moments? / What would I give / Just to have you near?"

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."

First day, maybe the only day

Yeah, so, I've had this odd hankering to start a blog just for the heck of it. Plus, it's always a good time to jump on a bandwagon, right? Blogs just always seemed like a pointless endeavor to me. Don't get me wrong, the internet has always been a place to go and put your thoughts and opinions out there for everyone to see and debate, but the main question is, and always has been, "why should I care? What makes this person's opinions and thoughts worth my time, or anybody else's time, for that matter?" I'm not saying that they don't have a right to those feelings, but, Jesus, why the fuck should I really be reading it? They're called innermost feelings for a reason. It you want to have an outlet, just do it the old fashioned way: in a real journal, with pages. Oh. My. God. How antique, right? You know, I look around at how high tech everything is and how dependent everyone is on technology and wonder, "Whatever will we do if there's a massive EMP blast one day that wipes out everything electronic?" I've seen examples of teenagers' writing these days and wonder if they could ever get by without a computer to put their school papers and (one day in the not so far off future, kiddies, trust me, it sneaks up oh so fast) work reports and memos and the like on. If, as they say, the children are our future, it's going to be a smeary, hearts-over-the-i's-and-j's mess.

Moving back for a moment, I guess the main problem I have with blogs is that I feel like a parent sneaking a peak into their kid's journal. Bloggers may be putting something out there for all to see, but that's kind of like what a streaker does, and that's just not my cup of tea, junior.
So, will I continue my Lewis-Blackian rants? Will the horrible stream of consciousness writing live on? Tune in next...whenever to find out, and if you hold your breath until then, I'll give you two shiny nickels when I come back.

Song of the Post (The deal with this is that at the end of each post, I'll post a favorite line from whatever song I'm listening to at the time. I'll leave the artist name and song title off and tell you what they are in the next post, then have a new quote. Ooo! Fun!): "Beginnin' to think that I'm wastin' time, / I don't understand the things I do."