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Almond
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I haven't seen a blog thread on here for a while.
I think I'm going through a third-of-life crisis that I think is completely unnecessary.
I have my yearly checkup coming up. I'm going to pay a $20 co-payment for someone to weigh me and check my blood pressure. I'll come up with a list of stupid questions to ask my doctor so I can get my $20 worth.
I keep thinking about the bedbugs and how they're eventually going to make it to CA.
I think I'm going through a third-of-life crisis that I think is completely unnecessary.
I have my yearly checkup coming up. I'm going to pay a $20 co-payment for someone to weigh me and check my blood pressure. I'll come up with a list of stupid questions to ask my doctor so I can get my $20 worth.
I keep thinking about the bedbugs and how they're eventually going to make it to CA.
Comments
Oh, and the cat keeps dropping major logs in his garden too.
P.S. Almond: Just do a whole lot of drugs the week before you see your doctor. That will give you way more than $20 worth of conversation.
I got a second job recently.
Going to NYC soon to visit a friend. Will watch out for bedbugs and bears (Adirondacks-related).
This cold weather is nice.
you could make your cat wear a bell, so it can't sneak up on any little critters
http://www.wikihow.com/Get-Over-a-Break-Up
Nothing anyone says will make this easier for you.
I never get "over" a break-up...I actually don't break-up at all. I just understand, stay by side, and support whatever choices they make...
...I know I can only control myself. So, I don't get too worried about what I get dealt, just what I do with it.
Yearly check up...I would ask:
Am I getting enough to eat and enough water to drink?
Am I getting enough exercise?
Is my blood pressure alright?
Do my shoes have enough arch support?
Am I flexible enough / doing enough yoga?
...oh yeah, ask for record recommendations to share :necessary:
I've also been all about eating in the East Bay these days.
www.pigsaredelicious.com
I got some Comte burning a whole in my pocket!
My favorite purchases were the Kalamata olives and the goat's milk brie. I bought a bunch of stuff I can prepare quickly for those nights when I get home late. I made a really fresh tasting salad for dinner and it was wonderful.
Waxjunky, that third wine bottle has an absolutely beautiful label. California has great wine, but too bad I don't have much of a taste for alcohol. What's the dish you posted?
NICE!!!!!!!! Chateau Latour is one of my all time favorite wines. What did you eat with the Chateau Latour? Last time we drank a bottle it was with roast leg of lamb. You are mos def BAAAAALLLLLIIIINNNNN for that one! LOL
Glad you posted this. Been meaning to check this for a bit now.
Thank you.
It was a 1990, and at age 20, it was almost transcendent.
That's a delicious bowl of bimbimbap from Koryo (just a couple blocks from Amoeba/Rasputins on Telegraph).
I drank the Latour on its own, which might be a sin. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing, so no red meat on hand.
Berkeley heads know the deal.
1. The strings in Ten City's "Devotion (Bam Bam's House Mix)". There's a microscopic hitch in the rhythm that keeps me thinking that the loop isn't gonna make it, that it's gonna run too long and miss by thismuch, but then there's that quick little tumble right at the end, and everything catches and keeps moving on up and up and up.
2. The chorus in Pylon's "Cool". The singer's voice is pitched identically to the guitar, and after she says "Everything is! Everything is! Everything is!", it really sounds like she's missed the turnoff. But then you realize that only the soundalike guitar has gone over the cliff; she ducked out at the last possible second to button-hook back and catch just perfectly the "Cooooool...".
(Honorable Mention: "Bad Boy For Life." Not that hot of a song, but that many-syllabled guitar loop still keeps me on the edge of my seat.)
-- FAT STEVE ALBINI
-- I've been to Reckless Records about three times in the last nine months, and each of those three times my purchases have included a Scritti Politti record and an Alvin And The Chipmunks record. And that's gonna have to be okay with you.
-- Hey, do any of my old-school breaks dudes know a record called "Fat Sap From Africa?" Just the other day I was thinking about some article I read in The Source back in like 1942 that was a roundtable discussion between a bunch of founding DJs like Charlie Chase and Jazzy Joyce and Theodore and whoever else, and they were rattling off the names of breaks you might hear at their respective shows back in the day, and I can place all of them except that "Fat Sap" one. Does anyone know that if that's for real? Or is it some "Arawak All-Stars" cover-up shit? (In a side note: using both "old-school" [twice!] and "back in the day" in the same post is making me feel a little like puking into my PNB hat.)
-- September or not, I'm still keeping Summer hours.
-- Things I can't play loud enough, that I have to press the headphones againts my ears with both hands:
1. Sugar's "Helpless"
2. The Bar Kays' "Holy Ghost"
3. The last minute of Sly's "Stand"
4. The Tree Stumps' "Jennie Lee"
5. The break from Truth's "I Can't Go On"
...and on and on and on...
-- Two things that maybe aren't as good as you remember:
1. The first five minutes of "Wanna Be Startin' Something"
2. Most of Who's Afraid Of The Art Of Noise
-- Two records that are crazier than you remember:
1. The looooong version of Strafe's "Set It Off." Constipated male diva astraddle a two-headed leviathan of 808 and echo, commanding it to gather abandoned satellites and origami-fold them into haunted lofts for uban goths. This one starts in some cold crotch of outer space, and nine minutes later it's borderline hysterical, electric-sliding out of a dead mall on a puddle of plastic-vampire-fang drool.
2. Eric Burdon And The Animals' "A Girl Named Sandoz." The vibraphone is burning, and everything is wrapped in thorns, but Burdon's "yeah, baby!" after the bridge is a joyous backwards-cannonball into the void of immolationg fuzz. And my copy of this came with a fucking jukebox strip! Can you imagine sipping a sasparilla on a stool somewhere and motherfucking "Sandoz" comes on?! The mind boggles. It's almost as bugged as that "Synthetic Substitution" picture sleeve that says "Especially For Discotheques!" There must exist worlds very different from our own.
-- Two instances of soft drums that still somehow kinda get it in:
1. Steve Windwood's "Spanish Dancer"
2. Gran Am's "Get High"
-- I was excited (perhaps unduly so) to recently pick up a clean, picture-sleeve copy of "Don't Dream It's Over." Straight up, this is my particular generation's"Whiter Shade Of Pale."
-- I'm not one to boast, but my french-toast game is kinda live. Complex taste, flawless texture, Canadian sizzurp (sorry, Vermont), warmed plates, the whole shit. I can't really get into the details here, but it involves my patented seventeen-dollar process and a not-inconsiderable amount of liquor. Ultimately, it is perhaps more accurately described as extra-French. Come through on some Sunday and see what I mean. I mean, don't really, because I almost always hate seeing people, but, yeah--come on through.
-- Speaking of Canadia: The illest chorus I can think of right at this second that's not from an Ultramagnetic song is The Odds' "Wendy Under The Stars." The whole song is pretty cold-blooded, actually.
-- One of the reasons I love Chicago radio: Last week, Theo Parrish's "Chemistry" into M|A|R|R|S's "Pump Up The Volume" into Gwen McCrae's "All This Love That I'm Giving" into after that does it matter?
-- Speaking of M|A|R|R|S, I slept on A.R. Kane for far too long. At their best, it's some of the only stuff I've heard that can honestly compare with late-period Arthur Russell, which is some of my favorite shit ever. Lazy in spots, but genius moments abound. I'm mostly about the i record, but I can definitely get with some of that last record, too.
-- Three songs that consistently get my kid buck-wild on the mini-tramp:
1. Can's "Moonshake"
2. ESG's "The Beat"
3. Color Me Badd's "All 4 Love"
-- One phrase I've used that was perhaps more regrettable than "buck-wild on the mini-tramp": "Holger Czukay freaking the dictaphone" (Hey, this was several years ago, and I was talking to someone about a David Sylvain album from the far side of a few cocktails--cut me some slack.)
-- Lastly on this note, two rap songs waiting to be written:
1. "Cold Mini-Trampin' With Flavor Flav"
2. "Girls L.G.B.N.A.M-T"
-- "Might have to sic a hobo on ya!"
-- Two ill pieces of apparel I saw at this backwoods motorcycle shop in South Carolina:
1. A black t-shirt that said "I'd Rather See My Sister In A Whorehouse Than My Brother On A Honda"
2. A black baby onesie that said "I'm Here Because Mama Missed Her Cycle"
-- Two songs that I could listen to for a long, long time:
1. Change's "Glow Of Love." Every iteration of that piano refrain is another thin golden ring around the entire world.
2. The Revolutionaries' "Kunta Kinte (Version 1)." It's mainly that keening, weirdly crystalline Mannheim Steamroller synth line that wanders in and out of foghorn bleat, frog-croak, and horn report. I could follow it forever.
-- I'm addicted to this youtube of Suicide doing "Ghost Rider" in like '77: Its colors have ground down to just black and wax, and most of its five minutes is a close-up of Alan Vega's face twitching and grimacing while his body preens and seizes, dead eyes lanced by a live wire. He looks like he's being shot with arrows. His barking, spitting, and yelping is an exorcism so pure in its venom and disgust that the moments where he finds the words and actually starts singing are almost a disappointment.
-- Withdrawal, you know, it has a way of dissolving into perspective.
-- I mean, everything is cool and everything, but, still and always, the perennial question: Where are my motherfuckers who, you know, believe?
-- "Tell Me How You Feel"
b/w
"Do You Know What I Mean?"
-- Two baffling snatches of celebrity-related conversation I've overheard recently:
1. "Man, fuck Gene Hackman!"
2. "Yeah, on like that Montell Jordan level..."
(Honorable Mention: Some dude bragging about how he used to get his hair cut at the same place as Darryl Pandy.)
-- Semi-esoteric record-nerd diss: "Your moms lets me do it without the fez on."
-- For no good reason, not too long ago I was thinking about this time back in late high school when I was tagging along with my man Pruitt when he stopped out in the county to visit some friend of his. The friend was this brawny, Nordic farm-boy type--really affable and completely guileless. After some quick catching up, he asked if we wanted to see his new gun--he just got it the weekend before. I was a little knotty about the whole thing, but this was pretty much exactly the kind of reason that dudes around there visited friends who lived out in the county, so Pruitt said yes and we went upstairs to dude's slant-roofed attic room. The friend gets a case off the dresser and starts gingerly showing off this black, sharklike Ruger with the price tag still dangling from it and still smelling like clean oil. We ask him the dumb shit you ask in situations like this--"Where'd you get it?" "How much did it cost?"--and after some prodding, it comes out that it was a gift from his girlfriend. After even more prodding, he sheepishly confesses that his girlfriend is some married lady who works down at the credit union. Pruitt's needling him about that, and dude gets all abashed, then a little vexed: "Man, I don't know--it's all confusing now. Whenever we're together--especially since, like, Saturday--she spends almost the whole time talking about her husband, like where he goes all the time, his work schedule, where he hangs out, where he drinks, even where he fishes. And I'm like, 'Man, what the hell makes her think I want to know all that for?' I don't get it, man. And, like, we've just been kinda cool with everything that's going on with us, kinda casual, you know, and then she gives me this big expensive gift. I just don't know, man." After a quiet, endless minute, Pruitt and I both swallowed hard and tried to think of what to say. It seemed clear to us both that his friend was the only one in the room that didn't understand exactly what his girlfriend was after. We fumbled with a little more polite conversation, then got the fuck out of there. I mean, I never heard that anything ever happened with all that, but damn.
-- One of my favorite beat-drops of all time is the lp version of Soul II Soul's "Back To Life." I remember a lot of folks being heated that the lush, forward-pointing version they knew from the radio was not the version on the album (cf. "Poppa Large," "The Choice Is Yours," et al.), but I also remember a lot of the uninitiated furrowing their brow and fidgeting for those minutes upon minutes of acapella swirl, and then--without even really knowing why--going absolutely Mad-Dog-20-20 when the super-sized "Impeach" drums hit.
-- Whatchinz know about a lesbian steppers' set?
-- Most/least serendipitous recent one-two resulting from my mp3 player's alphabetization: Sade's "Kiss Of Life" into Stone Coal White's "You Know"
-- When I was a kid, in a single afternoon at the public pool, I heard for the first time ever both Steely Dan's "Do It Again" and Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams." Just think about that shit for a second.
-- If someone put out a mix composed entirely of One Way b-sides and album cuts, I'd be on it like a cheap suit. "Dynomite"? "Give Me One More Chance"? The heavy-heavy, "Guess You Didn't Know" (the poor man's "Baby Doll" [Fatback] and/or the obscurantist man's "Summer Madness")? Yes, please.
-- Hey, someone tell Rockadelic that he has an evil twin here in Chicago--the hair, the beard, the shades, and the whole shit--who's "compromising the brand" by staying posted up outside his apartment building in Oakleys, half-shirts, and Zubaz of many colors. Your man seems to do nothing but flick beercaps to his (admittedly good-looking) doberman while endlessly detailing his immaculately preserved viridian El Camino, which is tricked out with the skull gearshift and the bumper sticker that says "I'm Not Speeding, I'm Qualifying!" How dude ended up in Hyde Park I will never know, but he is clearly the Jim Dandy Mangrum to Rock's Gregg Allman, and I really feel like the two of them need to square off in a pay-per-view pickaxe fight or something.
-- Chaka Khan has one of my favorite voices ever, but I can't really fuck with "Tearin' It Up," and it's all because of the dopey way she pronounces her "r"s therein. "You'll nev-urr get away!" "All yurr grooves!" ad nauseaum. She's my girl and all (long-time crush, too: ever since the "Feel For You" video, I've always wanted her just to, like, come take me shopping or something), but she sounds like Reggie Miller on that shit. Luckily the twelve-inch has an instrumental mix by "Larry Laven" (of the Ecstacy Carport?) that sounds kinda fresh played at 33 and pitched up.
-- But you know, a lot of these things you just have to find out for yourself.
Anybody remember this cold lil dude?
since then i met a girl who is unfuckingbelieveably awesome.
i just picked up about 16 tabs of acid. we plan on taking some camping with us soon.
a few weekends ago we candy flipped up in nyc and roamed manhatten staying at the st marks hotel for the night. definitely a spiritual journey.
my dad's in the hospital in ohio right now at the cleveland clinic. they boast having the best team of heart doctors in the country, maybe even the world. i just got back from visiting him on sunday. he had emergency surgery after going there to simply have a diagnostic check up on his heart. he was pretty much going to die soon if he didnt get the surgery it turns out. this is his 2nd bypass. the first time he had a triple bypass. all of those bypass veins are now blocked pretty much.
problem is, docs are uncertain how much they've improved his heart. they say they think they made headway, however his kidney's are now failing and not functioning on their own. this was a risk going into the surgery. there's a decent chance he'll need dialysis for life. my pops has had some ailments that afflicted him for quite some time now. so i've lived for a while expecting that phone call from my mother explaining that something went wrong and etc. thing is, while you learn to understand conditions like these, you dont ever really accept them. maybe some do. i dont.
I tried to call a friend last night that I haven't talked to in a long time and got no answer, so I watched the "heart and soul" episode of Skeleton Warriors. At the end of the episode there is an interesting question about peace.
"Peace is such an abstract thing. Is it the comfort one takes in friends and family, or the rest that one occassionally finds from one's own soul, or does one achieved peace in the kind of silence of ones enemies before they make their peace with you?"
I think for me I find peace in working to make my friends and family comfortable to the point where I am sore and can rest from my soul. (I did this as a child in school, on the soccer field, and the track.)
Bob Weir said in his childhood, "there was a whole lot of love, but not very much peace."
Hope this helps you accept your lovins.
No need for the candy flips or nothin man...that is not you.
#3 almost became #4 when a friend of one of the hotheads started yelling and trying to hype his friend back up after I had calmed the guy down. I nearly throttled the guy ??? fcking tool.
#3 happened outside a party where a bunch of hipsters/wannabe-s played totally predictable dancehall to a room full of people whose behaviour and dance moves made me uncomfortable.
The straw that broke my last nerve was when they played a sequence off Tasha Rozez??? mixtape and tried to pass it off as their own.
We left.
Outside we met two guys from Ohio who were in Toronto on business. It was a great random conversation. I asked what they thought of Toronto ??? they loved it ??? but one guy, his beef with us was that the gym he got a day pass at wouldn???t give him a complimentary towel. The young staff suggested, with some sass I presume, paper towels. Ohio complied and busted the dispenser open right in front of everyone and took both rolls. LMHO ??? it was a good end to a messed up night.
I had to work on the first football weekend. :(
CFL started a while back, but I don't have cable, so I don't really follow them and tickets sell out like crazy.
I know, I was just messing with ya.
I went to the Texas Longhorns game Saturday night, which included an all-day tailgate party. Dudes smoked/grilled a whole side of beef. When I walked back by the tailgate site after the game on my way to my truck, some random dude approached me saying "the word is about to end and I like it". When I asked him what made him think that the world was about to end, he said "because I like it". Alright dude, time for me to go home then.
Maybe I won't go with her and enjoy the Saturday alone instead. But if she needs me to be there, I will be.