All Hail My Superior Knowledge

My arm hurts from patting myself on the back...

AP Today 9/30/06:
MONTREAL -- The Montreal Canadiens acquired defenseman Janne Niinimaa from Dallas on Saturday in a trade that sent center Mike Ribeiro to the Stars.

ME 07/05/06

...Dallas picks up Daryl Sydor from Tampa Bay, who also lost Pavel Kubina but picked up the youger Sydor started kit in Andy Delmore and Phillip Kuba from Minnesota, for a draft pick giving them 8 NHL level defensemen, but [Dallas has] no second line center with Jason Arnott off to Nashville... [obviously prior to Lindross signing... oh, they still have no second line center] sorry, Jeff Halpern from the Caps DOESN'T impress me, but they still have someone to trade - bye bye Janne Niinimaa!

Confessin' the Blues

I could feel it all around me the last few nights... it's not scary, just depressing and it's seemed worse the last few days. I guess I noticed Thursday... was there any moon Thursday? Maybe early and I missed it... but I looked out of the building and all there was was inky blackness broken by the streetlamps inadequately lighting the parking lot...

I felt it worse tonight - I got off early [900] and from about 730 on it felt like it should be midnight, stillness inside and outside the building...

It's coming. Another winter with those long nights, my life a series of rooms artificially lighted by GE 100 watters or fluorescent tubes. I'll get up and the sun will be bright over head, drive in and the sun will just be turning into the western sky, but when I take my lunch at 700, it will be dark as midnight. And it will almost be midnight when I open my door and set my briefcase down.

It's been a long few weeks setting up house. I'm just so frustrated that I haven't found that space for all my stuff yet. God, moving is like fucking WORK! I'm so down I almost called two people I should not be calling just to have someone to get a drink with. Maybe get my crank yanked, but at what cost? It wouldn't be worth it.

On the one bright side, I've been reading J.R. Moehringer's The Tender Bar and it's grabbed me like James Frye did. I've hardly put it down in four days, will probably finish tonight. Read Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs and HATED it. Might have made a good short story, but not a novel. This guy's supposed to be funny? Explain please Amanda the Bookworm!

I'm sorting out ideas in my head for something. And I need a good Sinatra Capitol years collection. Recommendations?

For CJF


I only caught a glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye
And for a few seconds
It was light the Ghost of Christmas passed
A quick sight of denim skirt
Mid thigh on tanned legs
Bosom pushing out so proud
Dirty blonde hair pulled back in a pony tail
And a flash of a toothy grin

Double take and the illusion is gone
God knows where you are now
But for a few seconds my heart stopped again
And I flashed back to our one crazy summer...

Nick Hornby and Bruce Springsteen and Me

Okay, in my light reading in the 'Reading Room,' I picked up Nick Hornby's Songbook, thinking those short essays would be good for...

Anyway, the first song listed in Nick's book is a song I talked about a while back: Bruce Springsteen's Thunder Road. And it started the gears going in my head again.

Now for my money, Thunder Road is the magnum opus of Springsteen's whole career, with the possible exception of My Hometown for raw emotional nerve touching. It's a moving slice of Americana, Steinbeck with it's own built in soundtrack. Thunder Road hit me my senior year of high school. It's a song about beginning something, of change and motion. You've hit one of those milestones that ends your innocent adolescence ["your graduation gown lies in rags at their feet"] and you're at the end of one road - the dead end where the road makes a T and you have to go left or right. It's fairly positive and optimistic, though it's really a declaration of freedom, a big F-U to the teachers, parents and the squares.

It appealed to me a lot at the time because I was the down and out kid. All my friends had busted ass and were off to college, giving that one horse town the finger and I was the one left behind praying [in vain] for some savior to rise from the streets. I understood Springsteen's wide eyed view and maybe even shared it in my small town in Texas kind of way. We hadn't yet seen Badlands or Jungleland, been caught in Tenth Avenue Freezeouts... I didn't realize what a disillusioned record Born In the U.S.A. was, but I knew the emptiness of missing friends he was singing about in Bobby Jean. I wanted to get out but I guess not enough to ever get off my ass and DO anything. I preferred to sit in my room and listen to Bruce sing about it and read Hunter Thompson or whomever describe people and places and experiences instead of having them.

Just like Bob Seger's Night Moves. Night Moves is a brilliant, aching, Springsteen inspired bit of nostalgia for the romanticism of being young and carefree and being so bored in your small town all you did was make out and try to score. It's a look back from a vantage point where that can put a lump in your throat and a name in your brain that needs a late night shot of whiskey to kill it.

These are the song that appealed to me more than Free Bird. Free Bird, Don McLean's American Pie, You Can't Always Get What You Want ... they seem to be just so over the top after only a few listens that they're sad. There's a few I can still do - Zep's Stairway to Heaven and Ten Years Gone [but NOT Kashmir] Bohemian Rhapsody, Like A Rolling Stone [there's still no other record that sounds like that], the whole Meat Loaf Bat Out of Hell album, Billy Joel's Scenes From An Italian Restaurant, the Crowes' Thorn In My Pride... the first part of Hey Jude. Hey Jude was my first favorite Beatles song and it's one of McCartney's best lyrics ever, but after a while four minutes of NA NA NA NA NA NA NA get old. But Sympathy for the Devil, Light My Fire, Layla, Low Spark of High Heeled Boys, Do You Feel Like We Do [and Baby I Love Your Ways, too] or Ted Nugent's Stranglehold... forget it.

Some other of the most important songs in my life:

I Heard It Through the Grapevine - Marvin Gaye

This song is so different form anything else in the Motown catalog along with Rare Earth doing I Know I'm Losing You, the Temps I Can't Get Next to You. The snap of the tambourine that starts this record, then those evil electric piano chords that HAD to inspire Gimme Shelter then the dry thump of the kick drum and the swish of the high hat and then the tambourine again coming back at you like a rattlesnake then the quick strikes of that snake in the guitar line and then the horns kick in with that warning and then drums kick it up and the bass rumbles to life under it all and then that tribal beat... and then Marvin is on, spitting the words out like a man done so wrong he's got to spit these words out like poison... OOOH Betcha wonder how I knew 'bout your plans to make me blue with some other guy that you knew before.... it's just almost indescribable!

Melissa - Allman Brothers

Greg Allman says this was Duane's favorite song that Greg ever wrote... ironically he didn't get to play on it, though Dickie Betts certainly channels Duane through for those lovely slide parts. They always did seem to have some sort of telepathy going on anyway. I remember discoving this in my uncle Rich's record cabinet and I was just knocked sideways by it. It was so breathtakingly beautiful and it doesn't get old.

Tell Her No - Zombies

This fals into that Lester Bangs / Phillip Seymour Hoffman rant from Almost Famous. It's three minutes of pop nothing that says more to me than anything in the whole Yes catalog. And with no guitars on it.

High School Football on National TV

The Southlake Carroll [Tx] Dragons were once again featured on ESPN this week playing some team from Louisiana... I just have to wonder what we're teaching kids about when we're featuring high school football on national TV. It's bad enough that we have the 'unpaid professionals' in college football [right Reggie Bush?], but if you start putting high school football on TV, how many kids and coaches are going to want to exploit that for their 15 seconds in the spotlight. {By the way, Andy Warhol had it wrong - my new saying is that everyone will have a fifteen second blurb / mention on television; there are almost enough channels to do it!}

I mean those high school kids are all ready screwed up from X Box and they think they don't have to finish school, they'll be professional poker players... Kids thinking that repeating Columbine is a 'way to go out - in a blaze of glory!' How badly desensitived have we as a nation become, but especially the kids who had TV and Playstation as they're babysitter the last 15 years? Are we headed for the hyper-violent society of Anthony Burgess' Clockwork Orange?

But hey, they can always give up school and become professional poker players.

After a grueling three weeks, things are starting to come into shape in my new, humble abode. Now that the outlets are set up in my reading / computer / music room and everything is where I think it will stay. The wires run under a threshold, not tackily [?] strung across walls, curtain rods and door jams and the stereo separation set up pretty well. My reading lamp for draping across the love seat here with a book and my amp set for any immediate need to strum along to the Clash, Faces or Lou Reed...I only need now to complete one more rack for CDs to have all my LPs and CDs out of boxes to be weeded through for the 'Move Purge.'

My kitchen no longer looks like a refugee camp for lost dishes, the boxes slowly making their way out to the garage for the inevitable garage sale. I've cooked [eggs and Rice A Roni] on a gas stove, my first adventures with gas. The floor now cleaned after tracking mud all across the place the last weekend [two weeks?] it really rained. One good thing about moving into a house where someone lived is I found lots of things here all ready, like cleaners - Lysol, Pine Sol, Comet... having two full kitchens was a pain in the neck. My sister came over the week I moved in and really helped me get the kitchen into almost working order. I still don't like where my coffee pot wound up, but short cords, low 1930s cabinets and few outlets lead one to occasionally compromise [though an idea JUST struck me!].

I can actually walk around and find things in my master bedroom. I put the screens back on and washed windows last weekend. Found out which windows open and which do not. Straighten and planned for the laundry room.

My sitting / living / TV room is pretty well set up also, new TV in place and TiVo. Will have cable in time for the NHL season Oct 6. It needs painted. The kitchen needs painted too. Flat yellow in the kitchen? No. I have been told I have carte blanche, so I will be taking advantage in spots.

The second bedroom is an organized disaster, the inevitable catch all room. My pictures still cover the bed, boxes of books on the floor by the book case, which is all ready full. A couple of spare lamps, which may come in handy if I change the lay of the master - I think the feng shui is wrong, but we'll see. It's only sweat and cursing and it can be put back in a few minutes.

The drive is about 40 minutes and they're starting the overnight repave of 183 from Euless to North East Mall / 820. I can cut across Euless on highway 10 by Bell; the lights are timed just right.

Tonight I have a few of the windows open for the cool air [59 for the low?]; having a snack and listening to a quiet CD of my own making. I was sitting down before I got on the computer and I noticed the trains. I don't have the airport close by, though the FWPD helicopter seems to be around a lot, but I have railroad tracks about 1/4 mile behind me. It's a quiet neighborhood and I can hear the train horns as they head in and out of the downtown switchyard. It's a lot nicer than the UPS/ Fed Ex jets taking off at 100 - 200 - 300 in the morning.

I am working on a Saturday for a housewarming. Details to follow.

Fake Sports and Fake Stars

So I turn on the ESPN World Series of Poker - yeah, I know what you're gonna say, but it was just background noise while I finished reading Omar Bradley's A General's Life so I can start on one of the other bios now cluttering my 'next read' pile - though I think I will finish David McCullough's Truman next. I also have McCullough's James Madison here, a George Marshall bio Called General of the Army and I bought a new LBJ bio at Borders tonight [Architect of American Ambition] along with SE Hinton's The Outsiders, JR Moehringer's The Tender Bar and Augusten Burrough's Running with Scissors for light reading...

Anyway, so I am finishing my book and occasionally watching a hand when they start showing some of the other people playing in this tournament - Dead Cain, Hank Azaria and former heavyweight boxing champ Lennox Lewis and the singer from Godsmack, whatever THEY are... and a thought strikes me [ouch!].

First of all, poker is not a SPORT - it's a skill. Racing is not a sport, either. Horseracing DAMN sure isn't a sport. Now ESPN is filling time with DARTS and poker all the time. Darts is a skill. Billiards and nine-ball are skills. Blackjack, too.

But it struck me all of a sudden how, oh five years ago you couldn't name a professional poker player - hell I'll BET you didn't even know such people existed until you saw Rounders. [Great movie by the way; Ed Norton rocks in it and Matt Damon is actually pretty good.] Now every damn channel on the dial has some sort of poker program [someone runs celebrity blackjack which is kind of neat because it's got a limit - 21 hands only!] and we can reel off four of five of the usual suspects - Johnny Chaing, Phil Helmouth, Daniel Negraneau, Howard Ledderer, Annie Duke and now the overly loud Jennifer Tilly and the Cathy lady whose face got hit by the ugly truck but who plays MEAN MEAN poker...

And suddenly these people are stars, sort of. And because it's the hot thing and because it is a place to see and be seen, you have B,C and D list stars showing up at these things to get fifteen seconds of screen time and name mention on TV. Or you have Bravo running Celebrity Poker Showdown, which is fun because those people play LIKE ME. And the money will at least go to charity, not into someone's pocket. But they get mostly B-List people, too. I think Dave Navarro has given up music and Carmen Electra to be on every damn one of them.

I know we Americans are SO BORED by our mundane, everyday lives that we have to make heroes of people who are living outside the 'Normal' system and making it pay. You know what, I'd rather study odds and make my living at playing cards or pool... but let's get real for a second. If you think those people are not working a lot of hours studying, folding, watching people play, learning to read players and odds, you are kidding yourself. This is just like the lottery - you could win 3 or 7 or 9 or 12 million with a little luck... all you have to do is pay your $ 10,000 entry fee [or work your win in thorough a lot of hours winning 'satellite tournaments]. You're gonna sweat a lotta bullets for your millions. Then, the target is on you for another year. And then there's LOSING. You can LOSE at this.

You know what, my job is about as unglamorous as they come. I have to deal with paranoids, crackpots and idiots. And yeah, I could lose my job. But it has set hours, I know what days I'll be off and it lets me afford most of what I want out of life. I'll stick with what I have. Unless someone wants to bankroll me, of course.

I was watching Antiques Roadshow Saturday afternoon while having brunch and getting ready for work. Go ahead, slam away.I sometimes watch the home repair shows and This Old House, though too many Saturdays at Jim's watching Jacques Pappan has turned me off to most cooking shows. Face it, I AM a nearly 40 year old man.

Anyway, I watching this parade of garage sale rescues and family heirlooms parade before the experts to attach some monetary value to this trash / treasure and I just started thinking about things I treasure. You know what some of the things I treasure most are? JUNK. Knick knacks. Roadrunners made of scrap metal and old washers, a genuine whittled from a tree limb slingshot, a "bunch of boards" that when put together make a foot stool, a one piece rolling pin... all things made for me by my grandfather. Not some "mass produced, still in the original carton" thing, but a piece of work had crafted by one man in his basement almost especially for me. [All the grandkids got the rolling pins].

My grandfather worked or years as a carpenter and he still has a basement full of tools and things I'll never know what they are or what they're for. But I'd love to have one of his old style tape measures - they're folding rulers, 6" or whatever and they fold out eight or ten times. I'd love to have it because HE used it. It was a part of his life day in and day out.

I would love one day to have his old rocking chair. It's an old 1970s chair with wear marks all down the arms and for many years it was His Chair, just like Archie Bunker's chair. Most of the grandkids and probably a lot of the great grandchildren have sat on his lap and been rubbed raw by a five o'clock shadow that still had a whiff of Old Spice in it or been pinched or knuckled, then he's give you a kiss. As we got older and taller we'd sneak into the room from behind and kiss him on his bald head. Jerry Jeff Walker has a song on A Man Must Carry On called Rockin' Chair; the chorus goes

If a rocking chair could read
The thoughts from people's minds
Oh the stories it could tell time after time
Of the stories others never hear
Of the thoughts one holds so dear
Oh how I wish I could've read my Grandpa's mind
As he rocked me in the rocking chair that don't rock no more

One day, his rocking chair will rock no more and I will be all the sadder for it... having that chair would be like having another piece of him. But I doubt that will be my luxury...

The same thing applies to my Dad. I don't treasure expensive carpets or vintage paintings [as if he had such things]. But when I was younger, I had his Navy star charts from when he was a navigator and I thought that was neat. I even had his sailor cap for a lot of years [sorry Dad, it's gone now].

Recently I came into possession of his old tool cabinet and tools. Yes, they're 30 year old Craftsman tools, but I had to leap at the chance to get them. Not just because they're tools: box and closed wrenches and more screwdrivers - but because they're my Dad's tools. I've all ready been using them for 25 years. They will always remind me of fixing alternators and oil changes and the transmission pan I put a hole in and hanging new fixtures in my parents bathroom. And the upside down outlet in the kitchen.

I think about these things and they mean almost nothing to anybody, but they're things I have to hold onto from two men who mean a lot to me, who taught me to take pride in my work and do it right the first time.