Help me, I love them both...

I hold in my hand page D5 of yesterday's LA Times. That's in the 'Calendar' section for you out-of-towners. Below the fold are two ads for concerts.

One is for 'An Evening With The Monkees'. Yes, Davey just died a few weeks ago, but Michael Nesmith will be on the tour. One night only, at the Greek, in November. I was a huge fan when I was eleven, and have Rhino's 4-CD complete box set. I even own "Justified", their reunion studio album.  Want to go.

In the other ad, and much sooner, The House of Blues on the Strip has the Dead Kennedys. These guys got me through my final, and successful, attempt at college. I sat for a Numerical Analysis final for my Comp Sci degree with 'Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables' blasting in my ears from an Aiwa cassette deck. My wife's an Elvis fan, yet somehow does not appreciate Jello Biafra's rendering of 'Viva Las Vegas'...strange..."Lot's of lovely women, the dice stay hot, got coke up my nose to dry away the snot. Viva Las Vegas!" What's not to love? What can't provide at least a modicum of  anger management to a ferocious late bloomer? 

The flip-side to that cassette was FEAR's 'More' Beer', but true to form, I only needed about half the allotted time to finish the exam. Finished 'Viva Las Vegas' as I dropped the blue book on the counter. It always has a little wobble in the recording speed just at the end. Thought it was my cassette, or the deck, but it's still there on the officially-released CD, so I guess they screwed up the original tape or pressing. Ah well, it's the scars on the leather that prove its authenticity...

What does it say of my tastes that I still like both of these bands? Secret hint: I went to the Weird Al concert on Sunday night.

The common thread in my taste is: I like bands that sound like they're enjoying making the music. Even if the music sounds fucking angry.

It's been a while...

...and some thing's have changed. Just got back last weekend from a vacation that I didn't need to come back from, at least not for work. The day before I was scheduled to leave, my contract was ended, in my third meeting of the day, at three in the afternoon. Well, it was a three-to-six-month contract that'd lasted well over seven years. But the end was abrupt nonetheless.

Some introspection is due, as well as some housecleaning, both literal and figurative. You should see the rat's nest that is my office. Or rather, my wife would wish you wouldn't. Maybe in making a dent in that I can find some peace in letting go of some, hopefully many, of the beginnings of various projects, the remnants of past interests not so much abandoned as put on hold.

Dawn would like me to take some time off from "work", without wasting time or being on some kind of slacker vacay. I need to build new programming skills, as mine have become worthless over seven years of babysitting a company's so-to-be-abandoned system (seven years? soon? whaaaa?) Which assumes I want to go back to programming.

And of course, there's the coming apocalypse, aka Election 2012.

So I have some time right now, maybe the last third of this year, to take a step back, to step off for a while, to rebuild and refocus. But I've got decisions to make also.

Which include what to write about. Some personal. Some political. All mine.

Here I go.