Really? You're advising people to RUN AWAY FROM GRIZZLY BEARS? Yes, because acting like prey is always a winning strategy. And let's face it, if you're going to run away from a bear, a more fitting line is "Be a sprinting world record holder or be food." I don't know of many other people who can outrun a 30mph-running grizzly.
Haven't these people ever heard of WOAH BEAR???? Forget the fancy hiking boots that Timberland was hawking. You're better off reassuring the bear that you are human. Seriously.
]]>As I've mentioned before, my music obsession kind of went into hibernation for five years after college up until just about three months ago. When I finally snapped out of it and dove head-first into my first all-out, all-consuming Shudder To Think binge in years, I discovered a whole new world of band-worship. Between blogs, YouTube, Craig Wedren on Twitter (!!!), and music/record-reviewing sites that have been given the benefit of a couple of years worth of perspective (the number of sites alone who herald Pony Express Record as one of the most underrated records of the nineties or who say Uh, we kinda screwed the pooch when we panned this record is pretty hefty), there is no longer a dearth of information about anything, even a band formerly as obscure as Shudder To Think (whose fan base has grown quite a bit in the eleven years since they broke up). Now you can find the entire video for X-French Tee Shirt, which until this summer I had seen less than four times whose fuzzy edges my memory struggled to keep a grasp on, on the Internet and watch it as many times as you want. Hardly sounds revolutionary now, but if I could go back in time and tell that to the struggling fansite maintainer from all those years ago, she'd probably pop an aneurysm out of sheer delight. When it comes to finding early, limited-release, out-of-print-like-you-read about recordings - recordings that are, in the words of the person performing on it, "hard to find, but worth your time & dimes" - that you paid an amount of money you'd not like to admit in a ferocious bidding war on eBay , it's an absolute wonder that you can find them available as downloads from places like Amazon.
A person like me is a kid in the proverbial candy store these days. Dedicated fansites have all but faded into obsolescence (though I'm seriously thinking about resurrecting my erstwhile Shudder-dedicated webspace), but the blogs that proclaim their virtues are abound. Live performances have been recorded and uploaded. In a niche that popular media has largely ignored, user-generated content is king. And as far as I'm concerned, music, fandom, and the Internet are all the better for it.
My answer: "Sarah Palin"
]]>We have a wonderful craft at our finger (needle?) tips. It is infinitely flexible, our creativity limited by only a few things, such as our ability to fund our stashes (but that's about it). We have the ability to make rectangles or tubes, or even a rectangle and a tube, all in one piece! We are not constrained the way many other fabric-based crafts are - we can create shaping and curves and make prettymuch whatever the bloody hell we want to. We have the power to make entire garments without sewing a single stitch.
Then why, why, WHY do you insist on writing patterns that are made flat and then sewn together??? I thought the WHOLE POINT of being able to make tubes is to avoid sewing things up! There is absolutely no reason to do it.
Why why WHY do you make patterns from the bottom up, making it impossible to try on for fit as you go??? This has got to be the biggest blunder ever in the knitting world. Again, this marvelous craft gives us many gifts, and one of them is the ability to custom-fit garments as we make them! Why why WHY do you eschew this gift??? Making things flat from the bottom up is TOXIC. How is it any different from buying something off the rack at a department store? All you've done is essentially made something that you had very little power to custom-make to your measurements to insure the fit you want.
Take the sleeve, for example. If I make a sleeve to go on a sweater the way that 95% of the available patterns do, then I'm going to start at the wrist, knit flat (thus inviting in the Dread Pirate Purling) and go up to the shoulder. Two problems: What if it's too short? Then I'm hosed. I have to unravel the entire bloody sleeve to add in extra inches. Secondly, last time I checked, an ARM is ROUND - why not knit the sleeve in the round??? Why bring in the extra work of purling and then seaming???
Knitting publishers, you are missing a huge market by favoring "traditionally" (aka convoluted) constructed garments. You are alienating Process Knitters who hate purling, who hate seaming. You are jettisoning the best parts of our craft by taking away the power to easily try on as we go and forgoing the ability to easily add or subtract length from a garment. It may take a tad bit more study to learn how to knit these garments, but isn't it worth it???
Designers like Barbara Walker, Wendy Bernard, Stephanie Japel, and Diane Soucy, I salute you! You have put the full power of knitting back into our hands and onto our needles and enabled us to knit like the craft originally intended!
And knitters, it's time to take back our craft. Let designers and publishers know that we are knitters, not seamstresses! Tell them that we embrace a challenge and want to learn new construction methods! Yell from the mountaintops that we are no longer going to cripple our craft or eschew the best that the yarn and needles have to offer! And if we all yell loudly enough, perhaps, just perhaps, they'll hear us and we can affect our own Knitter's Revolution and we can get back to the best of the heart that the needles offer us.
]]>See, certain words are off-limits in the house now. They're not the usual four-letter taboo words that are easy enough to keep out of your vocabulary if need be because the taboo is widely understood. No, these words - common necessary words like "box" and "head" - are off-limits because they'll either cause Cory to giggle or make him say "So to speak!" - the military equivalent of "that's what she said." You can't even say something like "I'm craving a salty snack" without hearing someone throw a So To Speak out there. It's even worse if there are other aircrew (or people who've worked with enough aircrew to regress to gigglers themselves) around - like, exponentially worse. Silly boys.
My typical response? I hold out four fingers on my hand and say, "my husband is this many!"
This is really, really typical and very prevalent in the community that Cory's in. When a bunch of us girls who are involved with guys who are This Many get together, this inevitably comes up as a topic of commiseration. It's something we've all come to accept to varying degrees and we've learned to censor ourselves but sometimes we're not totally successful, as the following anecdote will illustrate:
Last week I was making two enormous stock pots of chicken stock and of course it was splattering all over the place, making a huge mess. I was wearing an apron so I wouldn't have to chuck out ruined, grease-ridden clothes afterward, and Sienna was going out of her Little Doggie Mind because the apron smelled so good, soaking in all that delicious chickeny goodness. She was following me around like, well, a dog, hoping to get her some of that. In the middle of a particularly intense gaze from her, I turned to Cory and said, "She wants this chickeny apron so bad. That look on her face totally says 'I just want to put it in my mouth and suck on it!'"
Cory got a funny look on his face, turned aside, and after a couple of seconds I realized what had just come out of my mouth and how it totally came out wrong. I wasn't about to be embarrassed though - I was too excited because Cory hadn't said so to speak in the totally triumphant voice that he could have because I walked right into that one.
I'm thinking about upgrading him to (holds out eight fingers) this many!
I'll go right ahead and say that my experience with healthcare is very atypical. With the exception of the span of seven weeks between my 23rd birthday (at which point I no longer qualified under my dad's military plan) and going on active duty in the military, I have been under the umbrella of the military health system for my entire life. Yes, that's government-run healthcare. Sacre bleu! you may exclaim. Tres horrible! Well, as a recipient of government healthcare, over the course of my life, I have seen no increase in rates, no cutbacks in what is covered, and no payments for prescriptions - do you know anyone on the civilian side who can say that? I didn't even realize that people had to pay for healthcare and drugs until I was at least ten years old. It's something that I have completely taken for granted - I get sick, I get seen, if the clinic/hospital can't handle it I get referred somewhere else. Sure, I've run across bad doctors and bad diagnoses in my time, but I defy anyone under the civilian umbrella to say they've had pristine experiences their whole lives. Do not under any circumstances let my husband cite his life-threatening scare from last summer as an argument against government healthcare. If he had dragged his butt to the doctor three days earlier (like his wife, living three thousand miles away, had told him to do), his condition would have required more routine (i.e. non-emergent) care. But I digress.
Here's the problem with turning healthcare into a capitalist system: this is not like the mortgage crisis where people made stupid decisions and ruined themselves financially buying something that was above and beyond what they needed and could afford. Buying a house is a luxury because there are other options open to you. There is a happy medium between sleeping in a refrigerator box in a dirty alley and living in a McMansion in suburbia. The same can't be said of your health (making the obvious exceptions for elective surgeries, cosmetic treatments, etc.). The normal laws of supply and demand don't apply. Let's say you want a car. If you, say, want a Prius when gas is running $4.50 a gallon, you're going to pay a premium for that car because it's in high demand. You analyze your finances and your choices and you get the car that fits your budget (or risk financial problems - but you chose to take on the risk!!!) or you put a lot of miles on your bike. It's not the same if you go into the hospital with a ruptured spleen. a) you didn't choose to rupture that spleen, it just up and went splat. b) you can't shop around for treatments to find the method that fits your budget - you're going to be receiving the standard of care or you're going to die. c) if there's a run on spleen ruptures that week, you aren't going to be charged extra because it's the Hot New Thing In The Hospital, nor are you going to get cut a deal because the surgeons are trying to move those dusty spleen-fixing surgeries off the shelves.
Your health clearly isn't something that functions well on the market economy, so why are we trying to make it work that way? I'm not saying we should raze the whole system to the ground because it's working for the chronically healthy (who, like it or not, are kind of complicit in working the system to the detriment of the chronically ill). I'm just saying there has to be a better way. Ask anyone who is "uninsurable" - I'm sure they'd rather be on, say, government insurance rather than nothing at all.
Here's the problem though: you get everyone who has been deemed too big of a risk by the capitalist companies and put them under one umbrella, and that umbrella is going to get very expensive very fast. Hoo boy. Here's the part of my brilliant plan I haven't figured out - how do you manage those costs unless you pull in the healthy folks as well and make them pay into the plan so everyone is sharing the costs and the load? As I said, I don't want to up and nuke what we've got in place because a little competition is good - it's just that the level of competition that we have right now is toxic. So I'm not claiming to have all the answers, which is one reason I've held my tongue up to this point. It would just be nice if there was some voice of reason coming from the middle present in this debate.
]]>Before I collapse into a puddle of giddy I-hugged-Craig-Wedren goo, here's the setlist from tonight's show at the Bowery Ballroom, which doubled as the record release party for their new CD, Live from Home (which I haven't even gotten to listen to yet because the new netbook doesn't have a DVD/CD drive).
Craig gave me a copy of his setlist and they were originally going to play Love Catastrophe (Get Your Goat) after Lies About the Sky, but it was left off for some reason. Bummer.
We'll start by comparing my setlist wishlist with what actually went down tonight. The vast majority of the songs were there - the only one I really really missed was She Wears He-Harem (but I guess I can't complain because a live version is on their new CD). In reality, I can't complain for several reasons: 1) the show blew my mind. SO. AWESOME. 2) They played On In Love! If I had had even an inkling that there was the faintest chance on earth they would play it, you can bet yer ass that it would have been on the wishlist. 3) After they broke up in 1998 I thought I would never get to see them play. Tonight was a gift.
Now, onward!
]]> I showed up at the Bowery at about 8, figuring that I would miss at least one of the opening bands. Frankly that was fine by me because I wanted to preserve my hearing for Shudder so I could enjoy the show and not be in pain. Turns out that the first band hadn't even played. I was literally jittery with anticipation and feeling a little awkward being by myself so I ordered myself a Jack & Coke to settle the nerves and give my hands something to do and settled in to watch a bit of the first act. Another Shudder fan (hi Johnny!) struck up a conversation with me, and after we decided we weren't really into the first act we went downstairs to talk S2T and drink some more (which is the awesome thing about the Bowery and apparently other venues in NYC - they have a bar on a separate floor from the concert floor so you can escape, preserve your hearing, and chat). So the evening started off on an awesome foot right away because for the first time in my fourteen year fandom, I was having a conversation with another Shudder fan. I'm really not kidding when I tell you that practically no one has heard of them. While mingling downstairs, I struck up a conversation with drummer Kevin March who told me that Nathan Larson (guitar god extraordinaire) wouldn't be there. A bit of a bummer since he's really half of what I consider the core of Shudder To Think, but I refused to be too disappointed - see previous statement about the night being a gift.After the second act finished, we headed upstairs. I was having none of this namby-pamby standing-towards-the-back-business, so I planted myself up front and prepared to have my mind blown. They started off with A Vampire's Proposal, one of my favorites from Curses. The song is fantastic, but really starts to pick up towards the end with "And now/You know/I'll go/And leave you to your dreams/It seems/The light/Is sifting through the trees/But come/The night/I'll hold your neck to me" and the night was officially ON.
The songs went on in chronological order for a bit with Jade-Dust Eyes and About Three Dreams up next. I love these two songs (old-school friends of mine will remember that my online handle was Jade-Dust Eyes for a while. Seemed fitting with my green eyes and all) and I had even told Cory how much I was looking forward to seeing About Three Dreams live the last time it rolled up on the mp3 player. Shudder disappointed on neither front. Lies About the Sky (up next) was great to hear too. Apparently it reminds Craig of Joe Lo Truglio, one of the members of The State. I'd love to hear the backstory there... But I digress.
The boys skipped over Love Catastrophe and the rest of Get Your Goat for the time being and jumped right into Pony Express Record with 9 Fingers on You. It's one of the three best songs on their best album, so we all went ballistic with the fingerness of it all (vid of that night's performance). Gang of $ followed. I gotta say, I've always loved the song, but I gained a new appreciation of it hearing it live.
50,000 BC was next with She's a Skull (by far the best on the album) and Beauty Strike (one of Craig's favorite songs, he doesn't care that it's not on Pony Express Record). As a treat, Jefferson Friedman came out to reprise the role on the keyboard that he played during the 50,000 BC tour. My neurons pricked up at this because this was the same Jefferson Friedman who wrote the music for On In Love with Craig, who wrote the lyrics. I was happy to see him, but I just needed to wait for another two songs to get two pretty great surprises.
Now, here is where I tell you why I wasn't upset that Nathan wasn't there tonight. Chris Matthews, the original guitarist from way back when Shudder To Think was a mere high school band all the way through Get Your Goat, came out to play Red House and Day Ditty. He's a great performer, though I did miss the flair that the dreads added. Not that I ever saw him perform before, but y'know, YouTube is an awesome, awesome thing. But I digress. Day Ditty was one of my first favorites from Funeral and it's still one that I use to this day to settle an overactive mind when I'm trying to get to sleep. They combined the style of the original (quicker tempo) with the last recorded version (with Angela McClusky on First Love, Last Rites where she goes new places with the crooning). Red House is freakin' awesome on a gorgeous day, driving fast with the windows down, and it's pretty sweet live too. It's a fan favorite, so the energy from the crowd was feeding the band and vice versa, in one of those awesome feedback cycles. By this point, Johnny (remember Johnny? He's the one who struck up a conversation with me) had snaked his way up to the front with me, and dude, rocking out to Red House doesn't get any better than when there's another person rocking out with you (vid of that night's performance).
Thus ended part one. The non-Craig folks exited the stage, the American Contemporary Music Ensemble came out, and I knew what they were about to play. What followed for the next 20 minutes was a completely blissed-out Stacey. See, I loves me some Shudder To Think, but Jefferson Friedman and Craig Wedren are as potent a combination as Craig and Nathan were on Pony Express Record. Yes, that is saying something. Jefferson totally gets Craig's style and wrote some of the most amazing music I've ever heard to match Craig's completely operatic voice and words. Plus, watching Craig perform this is amazing. The emoting that's going on is off the chart. Anyway, On in Love is pretty new stuff (having debuted in February of this year and only having been performed three times before tonight) and as far as I could tell (at least from the people immediately around me) I was the only one who knew the lyrics. The thing that got me was that both Craig and Jefferson noticed that I was there singing along all by my lonesome. C'mon, Shudder fans, why aren't you as into this stuff as I am? Maybe you just didn't know about it before, so consider yourself educated now. I expect better from you next time.
ACME stuck around after the conclusion of Tarrying and treated us to an orchestral version of Baby Drop. I gotta say, it worked, especially the strange instrumental parts at the beginning of the song. I'm all for freshening up old songs. Speaking of: all but three (maybe four) members of ACME departed after Baby Drop (thus ending part two), and the ones who stayed behind played Shake Your Halo Down which then melted into Opening from High Art. This worked even better than Baby Drop because without some strings it's nigh impossible to recreate the sound made with wineglasses in the recording of Opening. Following the close of Opening the band transitioned back into the final thirty-or-so seconds of Shake Your Halo down. I never would have thoughr to combine the two songs, but clearly I'm not the musical artist at work here and I love that the band continues to play with their music, not just play it.
Then there was Pebbles. Ah, Pebbles. This song is impossible to resist from the very opening and, to me, really marks a formidable evolution in the group's songwriting skills. Tonight Shudder To Think graced us with a little slower, more mellow version of the song than was originally recorded. It kinda goes without saying that I loved it.
The next two songs were kind of a blur. Alone in Love was axed from Velvet Goldmine and picked up on Craig's solo CD, so, y'know, it was cool to get to hear it. So Into You was excellent as usual due to the facts that a) it's dripping with kinky sensuality and desire and b) the fact that it's not cheesy, neither of which the original can claim. Hopefully I can be forgiven for glossing over these two when they were sandwiched between powerhouses Pebbles and Hit Liquor. Hit Liquor is such a rad song and it was really, really ballsy for them to release it as a single. It holds the distinction of being the second Shudder song I ever heard - it was on an episode of Beavis & Butthead. What can I say? When you're 13, well, you like that stuff. I remember thinking it was pretty sweet that they didn't change the channel, because they always did that if they thought the song was lame. So, by the contrapositive blah blah blah, Hit Liquor passed the test and is officially cool - not that I needed a tautology to tell you that. Anyway, the version that the boys played tonight was more true to the original recording than the sped-up amped-up version on the new CD. I gotta say, once you've had the newer version it's hard to go back. But Craig kept the new super-sexy "Wanna............... watch?" and that more than made up for the slowed tempo. By the way, this song in particular proved that Mark Watrous, the hired gun who plays the guitar these days (albeit usually alongside Nathan), is well on his way to becoming a guitar god a la Nathan.
No Rm. 9, Kentucky followed and was made particularly memorable by the fact that it was the birthday of Caleb Burhans (one of the violinists) so Craig definitely was singing the first part of the song to him. At the conclusion of the song he said that the next song was their last, which I misheard as "that song was our last," and.... cue very very sad Stacey. I was all like, dudes, REALLY? You're going to leave out X-French Tee Shirt? I could overlook Nathan's absence but omitting that song is TREASONOUS. All was forgiven a moment later when the opening "Say what"? greeted my ears. As they played it, I went back to the moment in time fourteen years ago when, pissed off at my parents for not letting me sleep over at a friend's house, I stayed up late into the night watching music videos. What can I say? My parents' stubbornness and my angsty teenager-ness paid off, since that's the night I discovered Shudder To Think and my favorite song, yes, of course, X-French Tee Shirt. I closed my eyes (but not for too long, because those guys are awesome performers) and thought back to that lonely, angry night on the couch, how the music grabbed me, and how far we'd come together to that moment and space in time. It was an intense experience, almost religious in nature.
Honestly, a big part of me wanted them to be done with the show at that point. I didn't want them to stop playing, but how can mere mortals - even Shudder To Think - follow something so transcendent? Seriously, they would have had to pull out all the stops, like bring out Nathan and Stuart and play Kissi Penny with all its sweet little riffs perfectly intact, She-Wears He-Harem (in itself transcendent of sorts, but for very different reasons), and play the faster version of Hit Liquor. Twice. All the same, I was clapping and yelling for them to come back out and play some more. I mean, who knows? It could have happened.
The final four songs were from the twilight of their recording career, and honestly, are not my favorites. They started off with Survival, Craig saying "This one's about cancer... but it's happy!" I had always wondered about that. Next up: I have a soft spot for the glammy Ballad of Maxwell Demon, but it's not very Shudder-esque and probably could have done without it. I'm glad they played it over Hot One though. Next, we were treated to the ministrations of Jefferson playing the amplified acoustic on Saddest Day of My Life. They wrapped everything up with Appalachian Lullaby, Craig singing Nina's part, and no disrespect to Nina (Nathan's wife), but Craig does it much better.
At the conclusion of the show, I picked up my new CD (two weeks before the official release! Whooo!) and shirt and set about trying to meet Craig. I had come so far and loved his music for so long and been moved by it on so many profound levels that I couldn't not try. Talk about regret. So I found the manager and told her my story and, after refusing to make any promises, she cleared it with Craig. After he hadn't come down in the allotted time (not that I was upset or blamed him because he had family and friends up there), the security guy sent me up to do some mingling (don't ever let anyone tell you that New Yorkers are jerks. More on that later). He was in the middle of saying good-bye to a couple of people when I arrived, but after he was done with that he turned right to me and, with what was probably the least-needed sentence in the history of language, introduced himself. All the same, I'm glad he did because I got to see his smile up close. In photographs and in short films/movies I've seen him in, he always has the stone cold rock star look on his face (typical shot here - he's second from the right), even though you know he's gotta have a great sense of humor because he's great friends with the folks in The State and his roles in any State-related projects are always hilarious (two cases in point, from Wainy days: The Waindow - he's knitting - love it! and Rochelle Part 2 - he's singing about swimming - love it!). So don't believe the poker-faced man you see in the media: a warm genuine smile - the type that goes all the way to the eyes - comes to his face easily and often.
We talked briefly about the old fansite I used to run, about WAND, how much I love On In Love, his continuing work with Jefferson, and as I mentioned earlier, he gave me a setlist so I could check the one I had scribbled during the show for accuracy. So I made to leave at that point because as much as I wanted to stay, I didn't want to be that girl, but Craig offered me a drink instead - including some champagne from a bottle which I'm pretty sure he was drinking straight from during the show (it was a party, after all!) and started passing to the audience toward the end of the set (but it's cool, right? He told the girl he passed it to that she'd better not give him swine flu, so nothing to worry about...). I opted for the red wine instead and started talking with some of the other guys up there and Craig went downstairs a couple of minutes later. After I finished the wine, I knew I had to take off or I was seriously going to be that girl even worse than a couple of minutes earlier. He was on the stage packing up some equipment so I paused to thank him again and say goodbye. He apologized for taking off (wholly unnecessary but supremely gracious), expressed some gratitude for my making such a long pilgrimage to see Shudder play, and crouched down on the stage to give me a hug and a kiss on the cheek. I told him to keep making beautiful music and said goodbye. I managed to keep my shit together until I got back to my hotel room, whereupon I jumped up and down with abandon and SQUUEEEEEEEEEEEEEd like a little girl.
And thus ended my brush with some amazing people. I always knew that Craig Wedren had to be a great person - I had read on other fansites and in interviews how warm he is to his fans, and let's not forget the kind and appreciative email that he sent me six years ago when he found the fansite that I was running. I, uh, may have neglected to blog about it because some things just get you floating so high on cloud nine that you can't come back to earth and do something mundane like write about it (this being a notable exception). But I digress. The point is that Craig owes me nothing and yet he showed absolutely no hesitation in being 100% hospitable and warm to me, a total stranger, despite being surrounded by old friends who are so much cooler than me. That's the very definition of a gracious and wonderful human being.
So, how does one sum up a night like that? Part of me had been worried that I was anticipating it so much that I could only be disappointed, that it was unreasonable to expect Shudder To Think to live up to my astronomical expectations. But these guys totally delivered. The concert was amazing - Craig's voice was in prime form and he sits so comfortably in his role of consummate performer. Kevin is incredible on the drums. I'm a little disappointed I didn't spend more time watching him, but I was distracted by someone else less than six feet away from me. Jesse Krakow and Mark, the two hired guns on bass and guitar, respectively, were fantastic too. It's too bad that Nathan couldn't be there but the surprise of Chris Matthews and ACME made up for it. Getting to meet Craig at the end just put the whole experience over the top. Before I bought my ticket to New York, I had known that if I passed up this opportunity I would regret it. Having now been through the whole glorious experience, I now realize how much I had grossly underestimated the potential enormity of that regret. It goes down in the list of the top three nights of my life.
Now if only I could get A Vampire's Proposal and Tarrying unstuck from my brain...
Note: I'm pretty sure the pictures I got were crap because I was under the mistaken idea that it wouldn't be a good idea to take my D50. BrooklynVegan got some amazing shots - check them out!
Note 2: I apologize for the rambliness. It's part being passionate about the band, part I-haven't-slept-since-the-concert, which was 24 hours ago. I've spent the whole night/morning/afternoon writing and editing and my brain is a little fuzzy. Effing plane rides and airports...
]]>However, when that delicious feeling of coming excitement is missing from your emotional repertoire it can leave you feeling less than human inside. Until it's gone, you don't really understand exactly how key that facet of human experience is in making you feel, well, human.
This is the quandary I've found myself in over the last couple of years. Best as I can figure, it's the result of a defense mechanism that's locked itself into place during some of the toughest periods of my life that were alternately absolutely ecstatic and totally depressing. I can trace the roots back to the time when Cory and I were stuck in the depths of a long-distance relationship. I mean, talk about emotional ups and downs! Our relationship itself was remarkably stable because we put a lot of work into it and we really are right for each other, so that's not what I mean when I talk about ups and downs. I'm referring to the frenzy of delight I'd whip myself into before we got to see each other after three months of separation and the despair so heavy it literally felt like a body-crushing weight I'd feel when it was time to say goodbye again in, oh, about a week. Add to that the Air Force's carrot-dangling (yeah, I know, I'm writing about work on the Internet, a classic Dooce-ism, to which I would reply "suck it") when it came to actually getting Cory and me stationed together, which meant that what was supposed to be a one-year separation turned into a two-year separation and then ultimately a three-year separation and what started out as a long-distance courtship turned into a long-distance marriage. Do I even need to tell you what a horrible emotional roller-coaster full of gleeful anticipation and forlorn heartbreak that was? Yeah, I didn't think so.
This has all resulted a frustrating deadened feeling I've had a 90% unsuccessful time shaking. I may even need to pay someone to listen to me talk about my problems to shake it. I try so hard to feel excited about things (here's a partial list) and it just doesn't come the way it's supposed to. How do you force your mind to get the dopamine flowing (the neurotransmitter I assume is active in anticipation - correct me if I'm wrong) when your mind is trying to protect you from yourself? I've got tons of issues and handy little defense mechanisms that come hand-in-hand with them, so I think I'm pretty good at recognizing them by now.
So imagine my mingled surprise and delight when I found myself not just excited but literally coming apart at my very seams when I booked my flight to go see Shudder To Think's concert in New York City. What was this? I was internally jittery with anticipation, my brain going full-throttle to a complete SQUEEEEEEEE!!!!, barely able to contain everything that I was feeling. I wanted to sing from rooftops, not only because I was going to go see a concert I've been jonseing for since I was thirteen, but because my brain had just proven itself not totally broken! I was excited about being excited. I don't fully understand why I'm so jubilant - yes, I've been passionate about music in general and this band in particular my whole life, but I was also passionate about everything else on that list of mine. Why should I be so pumped about going to see some strangers play a bunch of songs when I couldn't muster up a fraction of that feeling when I was about to see my freakin' husband for the first time in three months?
I've no clue what the answer to this particular question is. The best I can figure is that this is something wholly new to get jazzed about. There are no loved ones waiting for me, but neither are there painful good-byes. There is just an event - a much-longed for event, but an event nonetheless. Maybe from my brain's point of view, this isn't something that it needs to protect me from. Plus it's a brand new experience. I mean, I'm traveling to New York City and I'm doing it by myself (this is one of those times I'm incredibly grateful to be an introvert. I don't think this would be half as fun if I was one of those extroverts that make up the bulk of the population). This is an adventure if I've ever heard of one. Like I mentioned in my previous post, my family is a little worried, but perhaps in reading this they will understand why I'm so keen to take the risk and do it. If it means that I finally get to welcome back some of that emotion that my life has been so bereft of for so long, I'm definitely willing to take it on.
During my latter time in Vegas this year I started to climb out of that void. I realized how long it had been since I had bought any new music and exactly how many albums my favorite artists had released while my head had been stuck in the sand. Before too long, I even started too look up Shudder To Think again even though they broke up in 1998 and it wasn't bloody likely that they had put out any new music. When I did that fateful lookup, it's like the music world exploded in my face. Those guys had been busy, and to my immense shock, they hadn't been busy 100% alone.
Yes! They had been reuniting while my head had been in the sand! They even toured last year!!! I was incensed that I had missed these opportunities - one of which had taken place near where Cory lived last year a mere six days before my birthday. Sometimes life just makes you kick yourself.
But my despair perked up its ears just a few days later when I learned that they were releasing a CD this September. And that despair did a full-on flip on its head when I found out they'd scheduled a single concert in early September in New York City. If you heard some manic squees across the country in late July, well, that was me, so freakin' giddy at the prospect of seeing my favorite band after longing for that very thing for the last fourteen years. (Yes, fourteen. They've been my favorite for over half my life!)
So I cashed in some frequent flier miles, bought myself a concert ticket, and here I am, sitting in the Tucson airport, waiting to board my flight to NYC all by my little lonesome, and so excited that I feel like my skin is going to come apart at the seams. My family thinks I'm crazy and I can hear the concern in their voices (Hi Mom and Dad!), but I've been given this complete gift of an opportunity and I will regret it for years if I don't get out there and live it.
The concert is on Wednesday night at the Bowery Ballroom, and I can't wait to see Craig, the virtuoso lead singer, and Nathan, guitar god extraordinaire (alas that Stuart, the imminent bassist, seems to have hung up his spurs, in Craig's words) and the hired guns they've assembled to play the greatest of their formidable library. As a total bonus, I'll be picking up their CD two weeks before its official release date. It's going to be a night to remember!
In anticipation of what's sure to be a great show, I'm going to post my wishlist of a setlist, the songs I'd most like to hear them play on this most golden of opportunities. Here they are, in no particular order:
X-French Tee Shirt is an absolute must since it's always been my favorite song of theirs and is my favorite song period. I have a feeling that Hit Liquor live is one of those songs that is essential to happiness and I just don't know it yet (kinda like the way another blogger wrote after seeing X-French Tee Shirt at the first quasi-Shudder show). A good chunk of my seltlist corresponds with the tracklist on Live From Home (the new CD), so I figure I've got a pretty good chance of seeing most of these.
I've more to write, but alas, the flight is boarding, so it's time for me to sign off. More to follow...
]]>It occurs to me that that paragraph contains a lot of information previously not available to readers, given that I haven't posted in, well, freakin' forever. I've had a lot to write, but just haven't (you can blame the introversion, and you can thank the wine for making me feel like I have to tell EVERYONE HOW MUCH I LOVE THEM - and believe me, I do!) so I'm going to make an honest effort to post the fantabulous recipes I've developed recently, the photos I took during my time in Alaska that never made it onto Lens, and write novels and novels worth of thoughts that I've had about life in general. Plus I also need to rename and redesign this blog (perhaps a redesign is due on my other two blogs), so any inspiration would be welcome. Somehow "Life in the Most Gaudy and Sinful City on Earth That Also Happens To Be a Godforsaken Desert" doesn't have quite the right ring to it.
So even if you don't drink, you should raise a glass to my friends Syrah and Pinot Noir for loosening the proverbial tongue, for I have re-entered the blogosphere. Those of you who have been bugging me to post need only to get me liquored up - take note!
]]>The dog looks to the door. Glancing at your watch, you realize that it's been hours since she was out. You open the door and spy a star in the crack you've made - you don't want to open the door too wide lest you let in the cold.
But something about that star lures you outside. In only a long-sleeved tee, slippers, and some flannel pants, you step outside in the 10 degree weather.
And wow.
There is the Aurora.
As it dances to its own beat, you watch alone in the cold, oblivious to the elements, as green peaks thrust up and ebb away, as ribbons snake across their own unfathomably vast canvas. You focus on the light in the sky, too close to the city to enjoy a private unpolluted view, shutting off all other senses, willing the eerie glow to intensify, willing the rest of the world to fall away. Who knows how long you watch, totally focused on that show that has held your fascination these last several years.
A door opens to your left, snapping you out of your reverie. Another dog had the same idea as yours. You turn to your neighbor to share the show with her, but it's dissipated as quickly as your isolation. Now that the rest of the world is being let in, you feel cold, realizing that it's crazy to be outside in such a thin shirt, but sadly realizing your opportunities to be crazy for such a cause are numbered.
How can you live anywhere after you've lived here? You're worried you won't ever find the answer.
]]>When I was in high school I read Into the Wild, a story by Jon Krakauer which has gained quite a bit more attention and recognition since it was made into a movie of the same name. I read the book on the tails of another Krakauer book, Into Thin Air, and frankly remember being pretty underwhelmed by the Christopher McCandless story because the story of an Everest tragedy was so much more compelling and used such powerful imagery. This is not totally surprising because Into the WIld is something of a biography, whereas Into Thin Air accounts the author's personal experiences. How could a huge personal ordeal so traumatic that the (ostensibly normally sober) author had to get high after getting off that mountain (something that obviously really stuck with my sheltered sixteen year old brain) compare with a story that was merely researched, observed from a distance? But I digress.
So when the movie came into theaters last year I didn't rush to see it. Now that I live in Alaska, I looked at the story as another cautionary tale of how, yes, Alaska can kill you. These cautionary tales are good. There are a lot of ways in that something that would be pretty trivial elsewhere - like forgetting your hat when you're only going to make a quick run from your heated garage to get a gallon of milk, or, say, making absolutely sure that you're not walking in between a mama and baby moose on the way to your car through a darkened parking lot - can cost you your life up here. It's good to remember things like this and to not be unprepared. And surely, if you were to sum up the many mistakes that Chrisopher McCandless made in one word, you would come up with "unprepared." There are a lot of people who view him as a tragic figure (except Alaskans, of course, who take a different tack on it, of course), but I can't say I was every really one of them.
Last week I was doing a shift of vampire hours so I decided to rent the movie to help pass the night. And I'd like to say that my perspective has changed a little in the ten years since I read the book. Now that I'm out of high school and am a denizen of this so-called real world, y'know, I can relate to McCandless' point of view and his thoughts of our modern society. I've had many of the same thoughts myself. What I can't agree with is the extreme to which he took those thoughts. I'd like to stress that for the loved ones who may have felt their blood pressure rise when they read that - I promise that I will not just up and leave and go move into a bus in the middle of interior Alaska and die. That said, I understand the need to feel like you're living life the way it is actually supposed to be lived - not working a meaningless job so that you can accumulate more material goods (I swear that I am actually a happy person even though I don't own an iPod). I think I've made it pretty clear in my infrequent postings here that I am dissatisfied with the way of work in modern society and I think everyone would just be happier if we were working with our hands in jobs that actually produced something concrete. I think that Mr. McCandless would give a "hear, hear" to that but would probably take it to an even greater extreme - he might even object if I owned a sheep and made my yarn from the beast and dyed it with plants from my garden, because all of that requires the acquisition of some material goods. I'm not opposed to owning material goods, I'm opposed to our society's gross "need" for stuff.
But here's the thing that got me about him, a slight hypocrisy in his philosophy: while he was living as a supertramp he was perfectly happy to live off or live with those who had the material goods that he rejected. He worked for farmers who owned outrageously expensive farm equipment or lived with hippies in RVs. He was still spun into the core of the fabric of the society that he so vigorously rejected. Even when he was living in the Alaska bush, he was living in a something that was an expensive material possession. He wasn't truly living off the land - he had industrially-produced shelter and (possibly) an industrially-produced means of generating heat. Even the gun he was using was another piece of metal. If this guy was trying to repudiate everything about our society, he should have been using things he had made with his own hands, living on the land, not on a bus. Does anyone else find it odd that he would take an expensive piece of steel wrought in a foundry with him into the wild, but not a $4 compass?
The inability to see such inconsistencies undoubtedly cost him his life. If he had been less rigid and more thoughtful, more critical, he would have seen that it made no sense in his philosophy to take a gun but not a compass or a map with him on his lone Alaska adventure. He would have understood that in being truly free, it made no sense to live in a bus, and he would have been more able and more willing to be nomadic and live where food was.
He was so blinded by his passion that logic totally escaped him and he could only see in black and white. As I said, while I sympathize with Christopher McCandless' ideas I can't reconcile his extremes, because ultimately they got him killed. In the end, he was not so extraordinary or so brave - he's just another example of natural selection in the Alaska bush.
]]>