Lyrical Uncertainty

Discography

lyricaluncertainty — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 17:12:33 +0000

I am 30 years old, sitting in my one-windowed office and listening to a new Pearl Jam album (Backspacer) that I stumbled upon last night. I have a condo, a puppy, a Mazda. They come with a mortgage, a schedule, and a car payment. I manage a team of people and a fairly large-sized business. I travel a lot, always with my iPod, always loaded with every piece of music I have ever owned, available via a simple button press at any given moment. I cannot imagine a better music technology ever existing.

I am 17 years old, driving my Mother’s minivan to the used CD store with my next-door neighbor to pick up a copy of Vitalogy so that I would now own all of Pearl Jam’s albums on this awesome new media format. I have a Sony Discman that I can play in the car through a very fancy tape-deck adaptor. When I drive over a bump or a pothole, the song skips and takes a second to find its way again, but I am utterly convinced of the merits and staying power of this new device.

I am 19 years old, in college now, sitting at the dining room table of my fraternity with a tape deck hooked up to the same Discman, making what I have titled the “Ultimate Pearl Jam Mix.” I am disappointed to have to be using a tape for this endeavor, but everybody knows that you can’t just record a CD with whatever you want on it. My mix tape leans more towards their newer stuff, Merkin Ball, No Code, and I think that this is really clever and deep. Everyone knows Ten, but Merkin Ball is small and unknown and special.

All of which is a long way of saying that though I know they say that scent is the strongest memory trigger, I do think that music has it beat on most days. And while I love the discovery of an unheard band or song or album, something new by one of these bands, one of these musical touchstones in my life, a band whose career I can literally chart through the calendar of my youth and into adulthood, it just means more. And you start to understand why people are still buying new Rolling Stones albums forty years after they released their first single.

These bands, they bring you back.

I am 30 years old, sitting in my office, writing a blog about Pearl Jam.

In America?

lyricaluncertainty — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 18:52:36 +0000

I haven’t posted here in a while, and for that I apologize, but I hope to make up for it with this absolutely fascinating tidbit.

There is, right now, in the state of Pennsylvania, a town that has been essentially erased from existence due to the fact that it has been on fire for the past 50 years. Go ahead and read that again. This is not a bad movie, or a joke, or a gag.

You see, there was a town, once, Centralia, that numbered roughly 2,000 Pennsylvanians. In 1962, the local fire department lit the town dump on fire (a standard practice apparently) and accidentally ignited the coal mine running beneath the entire town.

It started burning. And it is still burning because it’s, you know, coal. And you cannot, I gather, live and work atop a continuously burning coal mine fire without experiencing some rather serious side effects. The ground there actually smokes and belches flame, and the temperature several feet below the surface is over 170 degrees.

We have managed to create, in the middle of Pennsylvania, an actual, physical, manifestation of Hell.

So, in 1984, Congress allocated $84 million to relocate all of the residents of the town. In 1992, the state claimed the entire town via eminent domain, and in 2002, the Federal Government cancelled the town’s zip code. There is essentially a several square mile dead-zone, a non-existent place, that is literally on fire, in the middle of our country.

It is estimated that the mines beneath the town will continue burning for another 250 years.

I am absolutely speechless upon learning this. Did you know about this? Did you know that this was even possible? Why has nobody ever told me about this? Why does the national news not report on this story every single night?

And who is joining me for a road trip?

Bartender please

lyricaluncertainty — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 14:20:18 +0000

I have, through the course of my career, been blessed with the opportunity to visit the most amazing places and partake in some truly unique experiences too numerous to recount. Sporting events, far-off points in distant countries, race car races, race car rides, secret hidden restaurants, giant malls, and yes, once, duck hunting. In a pond.

I’ve had the pleasure of visiting most major cities in the US. I’ve seen their airports, their downtowns, their stadiums. I’ve eaten their blue crab, their ribs, their copper river salmon, their double-double’s, their gumbo, and their cheeseburger cheeseburgers.

I have, to sum up, been around a bit.

So it was with some skepticism that I visited, last week, rural Minnesota. Once there I had the opportunity to dine at the Westwood, situated on one of Minnesota’s 10,000 (seriously?) lakes. It was at this fine establishment that I was greeted with this lovely sign, which forever elevated Mankato, Minnesota to one of my favorite places in these great United States.

Eating their own

lyricaluncertainty — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 13:51:52 +0000

Peggy Noonan is usually a bit of a wingnut right-wing columnist. But not today. Today, writing about Palin’s resignation, she is the voice of truth:

In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn’t say what she read because she didn’t read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn’t thoughtful enough to know she wasn’t thoughtful enough.

You can read the full article here, and it’s well worth it. Please, please let this be the last, final word on this illiterate, ignorant twit.

By any other name

lyricaluncertainty — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 23:33:58 +0000

Perhaps it’s the inner geek in me, the eternally-nine-years-old Star Wars fan, but when I hear that you’ve decided to rebrand your restaurant as “The Hut,” my mind does not immediately think of this:

No.

It thinks of this:

Mmmmmm. Appetizing.

Now I will eat at your establishment.

Family Dining

lyricaluncertainty — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:42:55 +0000

Encountered on my travels last night, this rather plain looking coffee table.

But wait. There’s more.

Say that you’re, oh, I don’t know, sitting on your couch ordering a pizza through your TV. What do you do when said pizza arrives? Do you quit the television, that ever-present, ever-glowing, mind-numbing additional member of your family? Do you vacate the couch in favor of a dining room table, mayhaps to sup with your family and enjoy some evening conversation?

No, sir and madam, you need not.

What you can do, and really, why wouldn’t you, is raise your living room table to proper height and distance such that your television viewing experience may remain uninterrupted while you dine comfortably from your couch. But getting your coffee table to the proper height would be so difficult, you say.

I present you:

Dear reader, I swear that I am not being facetious here. This is the stated purpose of this table. To enable eating from the couch because, and I’m paraphrasing here, “who wants to get up from the TV just to eat dinner.”

I stood, marveling at this monstrosity, rubbing my temples in despair.

America. Please. I am begging you.

Stop. Just…..just stop it.

There is still time to turn this all around.

Nouns and verbs

lyricaluncertainty — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 14:23:58 +0000

Yesterday saw the passing of the “American Clean Energy and Security Act,” a bill that the Wall Street Journal calls out as historic for its sweeping changes in environmental regulation.

I don’t claim to be an expert on the matter, and I’m not familiar enough with the content of the bill to fairly judge its merits. What I will judge, however, are the political reactions.

Democrats:

Mr. Obama and other top Democrats insisted the measure will spur job-creating investments in “green” technologies, while lessening U.S. reliance on foreign oil.

Ok. That sounds optimistic, promising. I can get on board with that.

How about the Republican response:

[Republicans] contended the measure amounted to a job-killing tax on consumers and businesses. “The Waxman-Markey bill promises to destroy our standard of living,” said Rep. Frank Lucas (R., Okla.).

Um. Ok. That’s a bit…extreme.

I gather that you don’t like the bill, and that’s fine, but, really? A job killing tax on consumers and businesses that will destroy our standard of living?

Can we have no gradients in the language of our disagreement? Are our politicians really at a point where the choices are that they can either love something, or accuse it of destroying America?

Tell me, Congressman Lucas, will the bill also kill puppies and unicorns?

Anywhere but here

lyricaluncertainty — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 22:47:40 +0000

It is late on a Friday evening, and here I sit in my office doing homework for a particularly dubious cost accounting class.

I sit, also, upon a bit of a metaphysical precipice.

There is a song playing in the background in my little gray room, reverberating off the stark walls amidst the outside patter of rain and the inside roar of the cleaning crew, and it goes like this:

Have you seen me lately?

I was out on the radio, starting to change, somewhere out in America

It’s raining

Could you tell me, one thing you remember about me?

Just one thing you remember about me?

I remember me

All the little things that make up a memory

She said, she loved to watch me sleep

And she said, it’s the breathing, it’s the breathing in and out and in,

Have you seen me lately?

I can name at least three significant events of my life during which this song has been playing, quite randomly. This song, rather maudlin, always plays for me at times just like this.

I’m not quite sure what that means.

The song remains the same

lyricaluncertainty — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:43:01 +0000

These have been gray days here in New England, a seemingly never-ending onslaught of rain, clouds, and temperate temperatures not entirely befitting the month of June.

It weakens the soul, it does.

I have chosen, amidst the bleakness, to focus on something I encountered a few weeks ago when I need encouragement. At the beginning of the month, I found myself, rather last minute, attending a Dave Matthews concert here in Hartford on a Friday night. It was rainy and muddy and crowded, brimming with an uneasy energy that you encounter at these outdoor shows that mark the beginning of the summer season.

And it was absolutely teeming with youth.

The setlist began, old standards intertwined with songs from their latest CD, and I noticed something rather remarkable. While yes, the ants marched on as always and everybody sang along, these folks, these kids, were also singing along with all of the new songs.

Songs from the album that had come out three days ago.

My heart soared.

I remember these days. These days when a new album coming out was a big deal, an actual event in your life, and you and everyone you knew were consumed with getting it, playing it, and memorizing the lyrics to it. It played at the parties you went to, it rang out from small radios behind the counters of summer jobs, and the beat up cars of college compatriots blared it from their open windows as they drove by you on the street.

I, obviously, not only recall these days, but do so with great fondness. For me, the album wasn’t about a Groogrux King but rather the precedence of Crowded Streets, but I suspect that the experience largely remains the same.

And this, for some reason, fills me with great happiness and hope. For in a time of unquestionable turmoil, crushing economic conditions, and immense uncertainty, young people are still memorizing the words of an album within three days of its release, if only to be able to stand in a field on a Friday night and sing it out loud with their friends.

It really does lift you up.

Timing is Everything

lyricaluncertainty — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:55:31 +0000

Until 24 hours ago, I would not have believed that a product like this, the world’s first “anti-stab kitchen knife,” was needed.

I would have been wrong.

To the four people that read this blog and get this joke – I say we gift a set of these.