Rambling down the aisle

I’m like a recovering alcoholic with this blog: I fall off the regular posting wagon with alarming regularity, and then return with renewed vigor and commitment to frequent posting only to repeat the cycle once again. But with the wedding on the horizon, a date all but set, and a scant three months before Mich moves back to Houston, I might as well take another swig of the Blog Juice.

- Survived Ike safe and sound, thankfully without damage to the apt. Power was out for two weeks, so I stayed with my folks in Katy. The commute from The Boonies was great until the second week, when I-10 became the world’s largest parking lot. Being at the Chron during the storm recovery was a rush, and definitely a career highlight for me. (no, not just my not-even-half-year time at Texas St. The whole post-college career)

- Pleased with how the Astros finished the season, Ike notwithstanding. Resign Wolf and pick up another free agent pitcher, and we’ll be more than ok going into 2009. Also, someone please remind Hank Steinbrenner that the NL Central is baseball’s toughest division, not the AL East.

- Wedding planning is fun. Seriously. When else do you get to pick your own liturgy?

- Also, for the Ausmus-loving ladies in the readership, go to www.astros.com and view the tribute video that played before his last game here. Jeff Bagwell: great 1^st baseman, lousy comic timing.

- Bachelor party + friends who home brew = win.

- Among the songs that would be hilariously wrong as a wedding dance song: Better Man by Pearl Jam, Smack My Bitch Up by Prodigy, I Married Her Because She Looks Like You by Lyle Lovett, Fat Bottom Girls by Queen, I Will Survive as covered by Cake (now with 100% more F-bombs!), and I Love You Because I Have To by Dogs Die In Hot Cars. There are more. Lots more.

- I’m getting a custom shirt made at Billy Reid for the wedding. I’m way more excited about this than I should be. Now if only I could find a solid black suit with flat front pants, three buttons, and narrow lapels, and a skinny, black tonal-paisley tie.

- The Chron’s post-Ike power database was the best sociology experiment I’ve ever seen. The mood swings, the petulance and lack of perspective were all appalling and hilarious at the same time. Centerpoint, et al. did a helluva job in the days after the storm; they just need a new PR strategy and more honest customer service.

- Not especially blown away by the new St. Arnold’s Divine Reserve. It’s not bad, it’s actually quite good. But it’s not the home run in the way that the last two were.

- After becoming enamored with The Hold Steady after buying their “Boys and Girls in America” album, I’ve lately come to realize that their first album “…Almost Killed Me” is my favorite of theirs. Raw and rugged where their recent albums are more cohesive, confident and technically adept, the songs just fit their Midwestern bar band persona a lot better. It’s an uglier world, but it’s more exhilarating because it’s more scary.

- Finally, since it is Schadenfriday, I only have this to say to every Cubs fan who brought a sign cheering for Ike to the Astros’ “home” games in Milwaukee: do not tempt the Baseaball Gods, for they are cruel.  Have another lonely October, jerks.

So these are the soundtracks, the distractions and pressing concerns (minus a few unpublishable concerns) that are rattling around in my head at the moment. Naturally, as the wedding gets closer, this space should get a little bit more newsy, unless I’m just too busy to post.

On blogging, success, and an $8 peanut butter sandwich

Many of you (and by “you” I mean the five people who read this blog regularly and the sixteen people who were Googling for Looney Tunes slash fiction) have noted that this blog has gone un-updated for a while.  You have my heartfelt apologies, but I really didn’t have a darned thing to say for months.  Really.

When I began blogging four years ago, I decided that my little corner of the internet wouldn’t be a forum for my moping and whining.  It’s all to easy to come across that way, and especially given the stream-of-consciousness composition method that I use when I write, I very easily could’ve written quite a few posts that would’ve made a sixteen year old with a sparkling, seizure-inducing MySpace blush.  So when I would consider writing on here this spring, I always demurred, because I didn’t want to talk about the pressing, real-life concerns in my world: unemployment, crime, relationships, disappointment, writer’s block (of course), and finances.  Believe me, you wouldn’t want to read that dreck.

But why start writing now?  Well, I’m employed again (twice over) and haven’t had to talk to the police in almost a month, for starters.  Actually, that last part isn’t entirely true; I have had to talk about The Police.  For those of you who haven’t heard, I’m freelancing at the Houston Chronicle, and one of my recent assignments was to write a review of the Police/Elvis Costello show in the Woodlands.  Somehow, around the office here, this was deemed to be drawing the short straw.  For me, though, it was the first time in the five weeks that I’ve been here that I actually felt like something approaching a real journalist.  So that experience was the shot in the arm that I needed to start writing here again; it was something that I could re-tell here without it being so maudlin or boring that you’d click away to see what was posted on ManBabies today.

The quick timeline of writing the Police review, in chronological order: cracking myself up by thinking of fake interview questions for Sting (“what was it like playing the Goblin King in Labyrinth?”), figuring out how in the hell someone was going to edit my story at the ungodly hour it would be completed, receiving and then returning ALL the media tickets for the event, running into a nemesis,  cramming three people into Vesper for the return trip to town, a gigantic cup of coffee at Brasil, walking through the ghost town that Houston becomes on weekday nights, composing a caffiene-fueled piece while hoping not to be evicerated in the comments, meeting the creepy night editor, and slogging home too hyped up to sleep even though it was 3am.  Whew.

So back to the point, at heart I’m an optimist, and I’ve had plenty of reasons to support a more cheery outlook on life lately.  It even goes beyond the fact that I’ve got what amounts to my dream job right now (it is still a job, after), though.  On Wednesday, my post-deadline haze was rolled back under the influence of a sandwich and a conversation.  The role of the sandwich was played by the heavenly Fat Elvis at B’wiched on Westheimer, a pannini concoction of homemade peanut butter, caramelized bananas, and wild honey. (The King and the Big Puma would both be proud)  The conversation was provided by my dear old mum, who was somewhat out of the loop of recent developments in my life.  As I rattled through the litany of good things that’ve been happening, the act of relating them all in sequence brought to mind just how mind-numbingly blessed I’ve been lately.  As the great poets Chubawumba once said, I get knocked down, but I get up again, you’re never gonna keep me down.

(It’s stuck in your head now, isn’t it? You’re welcome.)

Anyway, on the heels of all this introspection and reflection, I rolled in to work this morning, intent on blogging, when I read this article.  While I don’t think I’ll ever have the attention of a large part of a major American city like she did, her experiences did really help me to coalesce the thoughts on my self-imposed hiatus, leading to the very entry you find here.  Writing has suddenly become not only my passion, but my livelihood, and I’m still wrestling with the implications of that.  Hopefully, it’ll make my writing here more vibrant and more focused, or it could just make this the one outlet for my not-suitable-for-print ramblings.

we. shall. see.

Yoooooooooooou should really stop doing that.

After a soldier has served his country, he is welcomed back into society with appreciation and pride, with thanks for the work he has done protecting our freedom with his service. After a Soulja has served his country by making hundreds if not thousands of dorky white girls think they can dance, and forced college coaches to humiliate themselves to appeal to a younger demo, what next? As the Soulja Boy dance craze thing has gone to absurd heights that the Macarena could only hope to reach, the question looms: what will kill this phenomenon?

As a service to everyone, I’ve come up with a list of people who, if they post videos on Youtube of themselves doing the Soulja Boy, would finally kill the dance once and for all.

- Kansas University Mark Mangino. This one is pretty self-explanatory. We’ll know if/when it happens when Kansas experiences its first earthquake this century.

- Condi Rice. Wait, scratch that. That’d be hot.

- (tie) Casey Kasem or Dick Clark. Because it would signal that pop music is dead, too.

- GWAR. Arguably the worst band of all time, whose fans are a leading argument for a reasoned and thoughful reconsideration of eugenics. Plus, the likelihood that someone would lose their balance an impale themselves on something sharp are pretty strong; Youtube frowns on snuff films.

- JI

- JIM THOME. He’s an all-American lug, and doesn’t seem to understand complex things. So if he understands how to “Superman a ho” then America is truly over.

- Osama. Sorry, too easy.

- Christopher Walken. The greatest dancer/actor of our generation should not stoop so low.

I’m sure that there are some glaring omissions here, but that’s all I can come up with on a single cup of coffee. If anyone would like to fill in the blanks, please do so. Do it for the children.

She could…go…all…the…way

Oh. Oh. Oooooooooh.

And Now A Word From My Grandmother

This is my 86 year old grandmother, Elyse Hays. She’s shown here with my cousin Dave, who is a scoundrel in the best way possible. However, if you were using the word “scoundrel” to describe anyone in this photo, it would necessarily be Dave, even if he were a humanitarian on the scale of Mother Teresa, because look at her.

I took my grandma out to lunch on Friday, and the conversation turned to Idaho, where my father was born, and where she and my late grandfather lived for close to a decade. I was talking about a friend who is considering attending Idaho State for Physical Therapy school, and this triggered a memory for my grandmother. She’s sharp as a tack and rarely misses details when old stories like this come up, so I will relate it here in as close an approximation of her verbal style as I can manage:

“Well, I was in the hospital in Pocotella after Bill was born, and they had me on a wing with all the other officer’s wives. Because Al was still in the service back then. And one day this nurse came rushing in all out of breath, and I thought “oh jeepers what now”. There was a young man, I don’t know if he was enlisted or an officer, but he had gone out on the town Friday night with one of the girls from the town. All the women in Pocotella just loved the Army guys, you know.

The nurse started to tell the story: Their date didn’t go so well, and the girl told him to go take a walk. And so he went and he drank a lot and then he cut off a certain part of his anatomy. And the nurse held up this jar, and there it was. They passed it all around that wing, and everyone saw it, and it was just the oddest thing you’d ever seen.

Now the Army doesn’t allow for self-injury, so he was dishonorably discharged.”

Needless to say, 1) I nearly wrecked my car and 2) we got the wrong scoundrel. I love my grandma.