Get Off My Lawn!

Guns N' Roses is conspiring to make me feel old.

Really.

It all started last year, when I went to a club to see a FOAF's band that was coming to town. It was an 18-and-up show, and the girl working the door looked to be about nineteen. I noticed she was wearing a Guns N' Roses T-shirt - a shirt that I used to own. A shirt, in fact, that I bought after seeing them in Dayton, OH my junior year in high school - I remember it was right in the middle of mid-term exams, and due to what I can only assume was one of Axl Rose's trademark hissy fits, the show started about three hours late. I didn't get home until almost 4 o'clock in the morning, and I bombed my biology exam.

The problem was, this girl wasn't wearing the shirt in a "Hey-I-went-to-this-show" way - she was wearing it in a "I'm-so-retro-with-this-vintage-shirt-and-my-Hot-Topic- leopard-print-handbag" way. When I said, "Hey, I used to have that same shirt", she gave me a look that said "That's great, Gramps, try not to fall down and break your hip on our dance floor". Then, while flipping past MTV a few days later, I saw some snot-nosed punk wearing another G'N'R shirt I owned in high school - a shirt that was made when he was still in diapers.

Friday night I went out with a group of friends to celebrate one couple's tenth anniversary. That freaked me out a little, that I knew some people that had actually been married for ten whole years of their lives. Later that weekend I saw this article about Axl Rose and Tommy Hilfiger getting into a fight (I guess it's good to know that some things never change - namely, Axl Rose's ability to be a two-bit thug), and noticed it contained the following line:

"According to the 44-year-old singer..."

My first thought was, "Wait, that can't be right. That would mean the heyday of G'N'R was almost twenty years ago." So, I went to Wikipedia and looked it up. Appetite For Destruction came out in 1987.

Nineteen years ago.

Shit.

I bought that album the summer before I started high school. I vividly remember wearing my Walkman while mowing the lawn, listening to that album at full blast all summer.

Shit.

On top of all this, Axl Rose's appearance isn't helping matters any.

No Recess

My bathroom sink was stopped up last week, so I poured some drain opener down it, but that didn't work. Later on in the day I went to the hardware store and bought some industrial-strength drain opener and a drain auger. I put some of the wicked cautic drain opener down the sink and go to work with the drain auger. It starts to drain after a few minutes, so I was happy - until I hear a funny noise and notice that there's water leaking onto the floor. I open the cabinet under the sink, and realize that I punched a hole in the P-trap with the drain auger. After much cursing I get everything cleaned up and think, "Okay, I've seen every episode of Ask This Old House, I can handle replacing a P-trap". I go downstairs and get the Stillson wrench and start taking the pipes apart, and they're so old that they're literally crumbling. After a couple more trips to the hardware store I get sick of messing with it and decide I'll just call the plumber tommorrow (Luckily I have another bathroom I can use). So later on I'm sitting around watching that David Blaine special. It gets right to the end of the show and I hear an odd noise from the kitchen - I get up and turn on the light and see water pouring down the wall from my ceiling. I run upstairs to the bathroom and see water pouring out of the sink cabinet. I start throwing towels down as fast as I can, and notice that they are rapidly changing colors. It seems that the plumbing systems are connected for the adjoining units in my complex - my neighbor noticed her sink was running slow, so she decided to pour bleach and hot water down the drain, where it proceeded to run directly out onto my bathroom floor and down into the kitchen. On top of that, one of the cats must have gotten into some of the water that dripped onto the counter and proceeded to crap and throw up all over the house, and my hands reeked of bleach for two days. Now I'm gonna have to rip all the carpet out of the bathroom and put down tile or something. Sheesh.

The only good part of the past week was that I got to spend all day Saturday with my Mom to celebrate Mother's Day. While all my sisters ever bring to her house are minivans full of screaming kids, I took a different approach:



Two dozen roses - no wonder I'm the favorite.

I'm A Pincushion, Gotta Face the Facts

Hey all. Sorry for the lack of updates, but school has been kicking my butt this quarter, and it's gonna get worse before it gets better - I've got a mid-term on Sunday. While that definitely doesn't help my stress level, today I went to the doctor for my annual check-up and got inspected, poked, prodded, folded, stapled and mutilated, which is one of my least favorite things. Then my roommate tells me he's going to be moving out in a couple of months - not on bad terms or anything, he just wants to be closer to school & work (gas prices are killing him) so that will necessitate some belt-tightening on my part. It's kind of a catch-22, because I often thought that it would be nice to have the place all to myself and that I was getting a little old to have a roommate, but he's one of my best friends and we've lived together for seven years, so I'm sure it'll be weird when he's gone. Overall, not the best week.

Anyways, I stopped by my friendly local soul-sucking SuperUltraMegaMart for something the other day, and some guy was in the parking lot hawking CD's. Turns out he was part of a local group of rappers (what's the plural of "rappers"? Gaggle? Troop? Pod?) who've had some success locally with a song about the city that's gotten some airplay on the radio and used on some locally-produced TV shows (I think I heard it the other day on one of the local sports wrap-up shows). I gave him a few bucks for a CD, and noticed something: It looked damn good. I remember the days when my friends who were in bands would record to a Portastudio and spend hours dubbing tapes on their boomboxes and xeroxing black-and-white inserts. The CD I bought had a full-color laser printed cover that looked like it was shot by a professional photographer. I also noticed that it wasn't only a CD, it was also a "DVD magazine", so apparently there's some video content on it as well, although I haven't had a chance to look at that yet. The CD, along with the fact that I've been obsessed with podcasts lately, has me thinking about how far we've come in terms of producing and distributing content in the last twenty years, and how Hollywood and the RIAA are only trying to make things more difficult. But I realized it doesn't matter: I'm to the point were I could almost cut off my cable TV service and throw away all my radios & CD players, and I wouldn't really miss any of them. High-speed Internet access is dirt cheap, and if I was so inclined I could easily grab any TV shows I wanted via BitTorrent or Emule. Almost all of my radio listening has been replaced by podcasts - (the few show I do listen via a radio to are also available as podcasts if I wanted them). Spending as much time on the web as I do, a local band with a well-promoted website has a better chance of me noticing them than a giant cardboard cutout for the latest manufactured pop star at Blockbuster. I transfer all of this content, as well as files ripped from DVD's that I legally purchased, to my cell phone (although some people want to make that illegal). The entertainment industry is trying to hang on as long as they can, as evidenced by the many news stories that have been circulating in recent weeks. I urge you to get involved in protecting your rights by calling or writing your representatives or getting involved (at least read up!) via the many organizations and groups dedicated to consumer's rights.