There’s this place where I…

Observations

There’s this place where I go to get a cup of coffee sometimes. It’s a coffee shop. Naturally, it’s named after the fashion of the day — “From the Ground Up”. Inside this coffee shop we find a superfluity of odd signage, aged magazine advertisements, and random jetsam.

The jetsam includes a couple of A-Team stickers on the cash register. Both stickers include BA Baracus but the second is the interesting one. In this photo, BA is wearing bibbed overalls and one of the straps has come unsnapped. However, the bib has not slouched over to the snapped side, on account of the gold mass around BA’s neck that extends down to his chest and holds the bib in place!

Voting: Whoah! I stood in…

Adventures

Voting: Whoah! I stood in line last night for 3 hours, 45 minutes. Some people in our town who waited until closing time probably waited 4 and 1/2 hours. Who calculated that 1 registration checker could process 4000 voters in 13 hours?

All in all, it wasn’t a bad time. The night was crisp and still and everyone was in good spirits. The folks in line behind me were voting as a family and they rung up Domino’s Pizza for supper. Furthermore, I’m encouraged that that many people were not going to allow a 4 hour wait to stop them voting.

Along with Yellow Card’s…

Observations

Along with Yellow Card’s Ocean Avenue I purchased Jimmy Eat World’s latest, Futures. I’ll write something more extensive about that later but I’m about to put Futures on my chicken skin (goose bump) music list. I bring it up because when I hear chicken skin music it always gives me an appetite to perform or write or record.

Speaking of which, I had the pleasure of playing bass guitar for Driven To One last Friday. Playing in a band is so satisfying and Drew and Caleb are so much fun to hang and work with. I really hope we can find a way to continue working together.

At first listen, I thought…

Opuses

At first listen, I thought Yellow Card were yet another punk-pop clone. However, I saw a performance on television that began to change my mind and CW said he was enjoying their Ocean Avenue disc so I purchased it from Shopko for $10.

Now that I’ve heard the disc, I wouldn’t say they’re a punk-pop clone. Perhaps they’re a second cousin or a step-child to that bothersome archetype. The band’s vocals are very much in the punk-pop lineage but a fiddle and some other, less definite touches of style make the disc enjoyable.

The lyrics want some variety though. Before long the breakup songs wax tiresome, climaxing with Miles Apart, wherein the writers freely clod us with “apart”, “heart”, “start” rhymes. Happily, the breakup songs are interrupted by more refreshing, more captivating, more compelling songs. For example, instead of the oh so predictable “you were a rotten father” gripe, we find in Life of a Salesman an affirmation of an admirable dad. We also find View From Heaven, a cowboy song about a close friend’s death, and Believe, a tribute to the fallen firefighters of September 11, 2001.

I think it’s worth $10

Went to the mall this…

Family, Fun

Went to the mall this weekend. It was nuts, there were 85 bazillion people there because it’s been such a warm fall and Saturday was cold. I reckon everone was catching up on his shopping.

We ate at the taste bud extravaganza that is Panda Express. They had a job posted: “Now Hiring: Ass. Manager”. At first I thought maybe they had donkeys trained to prepare the food and wanted somebody to control them, then I thought “Nah, that can’t be it.” Maybe they have a stable of donkeys out back that they’re getting ready to butcher to put into the chicken lo mein. Well, it’s the only tenable theory I have.