My daughter, the ADULT.

Here's a self-portrait Selina took on her birthday.  She's so sassy and slightly awkward and… kind of amazing.  

Yesterday was my first born child's birthday.  She is TWENTY-ONE.  She's a young lady.  She's a woman of her own.  She's creative and funny and sometimes she's a forgetful spazz but she's always good hearted and kind.

Legally, she's been an adult for three years already.  She's been legally allowed to drink alcohol for two years, although it's just not her thing, and she got through two years of college without anybody talking her into drinking.  She's pretty good at using her stubbornness for good rather than evil.

She gave me a ride to my group therapy class (I mean, that's a good thing for a young person to do, right?  Take mom in for mental health help?) and then she got her passport photos taken, which of course made her look sweaty and tired and slightly ill, even though she wasn't any of those things.  It's like magic.  After she came to get me, we went to the Samsonite outlet and picked out her new suitcase.  Next week I'll have enough money to pay for it.  The saleswoman remembered us from her 19th birthday gift two years ago.  Same routine: stick a label with her name on it and set it aside until we come back.  This is just one more reason why I like that small city.

Then we went to Complacent Joe's for lunch.  It used to Crabby Joe's, but they just did a huge renovation, so it's all slick sports bar with "luxury" finishes that will probably look like crap in five years.  All of the sarcastic signs about good food and bad service are gone.  There are a few snarky notes in the menu but that's it.  Of course we laughed about this.  We ate our lunch while working up bits about how Crabby Joe made enough money that he's just not grumpy anymore.  And then we split a chocolate cake.

I absolutely love this person.  She is someone I choose to spend time with, and how convenient that she's my kid!

I've been needing a lot of help, and she's been a life saver.  She never complains about doing my barn chores if I'm not well.  She helps out with the garden.  I couldn't do it without her and my ol man.  Meanwhile she's been working away on her professional website, getting ready to present her art to the world, and run a business.  Oh, and also working part time at the church camp.  And cleaning the house.  And watching her favourite YouTube people do funny things.  And taking photos and cuddling the dog.

Today, she drove her brother to work and then took the Jetta for an oil change.  They will split the bill because they share the car and they are both, y'know, adults.  A few hours later, she's off to the other city, the bigger one, with all of her passport papers signed and ready to go.

She hugged the pug once more, sprawled on the foot of my bed, then flung her hair over her shoulder and grinned and said something like, "look at me, all ADULTY, driving around getting my stuff together like an ADULT!"

That's my kid.  Wow.

Johnny Friday - Wedding and Mixed Feelings Edition

I heard Johnny Depp got married this week.  Congratulations you two crazy kids!

He claims to be happy and I just want our Johnny to be happy.  Because he has brought me so much happiness over the years.  (yep sounds cheesy but it's true.)



She seems like a really cool chick who drives a late 60s Mustang and likes to take her shotgun to the shootin' range, and she reads a lot of obscure literature and you just know Johnny loves anything obscure, so they have things to discuss.  Plus, she's lovely to look at, if that matters.

Although… she's a little generic looking…. I mean, there are just so many pretty young blond women.  They all sort of blend.  Johnny has a type, but all of his his steady women have been outside of the norm.   I'm still biased in favour of Vanessa, with whom Johnny seemed to be at his absolute best.

She is pretty but just slightly off in a way I can't put my finger on, but which makes her so interesting and unique. She's got an overbite and a huge gap between her teeth, but her imperfections are intriguing.

Vanessa Paradis is never generic.  

It's not fair to compare the two women, but I just did, and I don't even know these people.  How crappy of me.

And are we going to talk about the age difference?  Are we?  Okay we are.  He's 51, she's 28.

gahhhhhhhhhh just paint her red and call her Ferrari.

(Sorry Amber.  I'm sure you're a good hang, but this is how it looks.)


If they looked genuinely happy about the whole arrangement, I'd be all for it.  Honestly.  But they don't.  They don't appear to be miserable, but they just are kind of there.  Of course, he always looks like he's itching and being poked with hot things when he's in public.  Maybe it's not as a result of a boring relationship.  Maybe he's just getting worse at leaving the house in his middle age.

"Yeah, we're here."

"I am the luckiest guy in the world."

Here's what really troubles me: he just has been looking not so good at all lately.

Rubbery, pale and greasy.  It's hard to uglify his beauty - and he's tried hard in many movies - and up until this last year I thought he was aging beautifully.  However, ill health does not look good at any age.

Remember when he showed up looking super hammered at an awards show recently and I said I hoped he was just good old drunk and not heading into some horrible disease that will rob him of the ability to walk a straight line and speak clearly?  Drunkenness can be dealt with.  Not easily, but it's possible.  And if that's the problem, I sincerely hope he takes care of it.  Selfishly, in fact, because even though I haven't paid to see a movie in a long stretch of time, I want him to be well and keep making movies.

I hope she is good for him.  I hope they are as in love as he claims they are.

I hope it gets easier to find pictures of them together where he's smiling.  

BECAUSE I JUST WANT PEOPLE I LIKE TO BE HAPPY, DAMMIT.


Sigh.  Oh Johnny, I'll always be willing to pull a lady out of a burning building for you.  



Geez, I just realized I wrote a whole post about Johnny and Amber getting married and I wrote about Vanessa.  Oh wow I am part of the problem.  Sorry Amber.  Please go have a fantastic career despite your husband.

Dear Miley. Don't lick the tools. First thing they teach in Plumber School.

That's really all I got to say about that.

My ill-informed take on technology, part 1: Google Glass, aka, DOUCHE MONOCLE

Note - the insult popular among the youngsters, referring to a feminine hygiene product (apparently it's an actual thing, or was back in the days when women supposedly wore pearls and pretty dresses to clean the house) is not a term I use regularly, or ever, but... I have never called anybody a D-bag, honest.  But this.  This.  Sorry.  Had to. 

When I first heard of "Google Glass" I immediately conjured a mental image of some insufferable hipster with a steampunk lens gadget stuffed into one eye socket.  Mostly this is because the article I read made it very clear that the thing, whatever it is, fits over just one eye, and it's called GLASS okay, Glass, singular, as opposed to GLASSES, plural.

See, only ONE.  

It used to be for aristocrats as seen above, or villains although the guy above looks like both possibly.  

The whole concept makes my eyes roll and my jaw drop, tongue hanging, strangled groaning noises coming out of my throat, and a desire to complain and rant that is only overwhelmed by my technological apathy.

But imagine this: all the cool techy people walking around sort of not really there because part of their brains are looking at the screen (in front of their eyes?) which is showing them supposedly all the important stuff they need to know in order to navigate the world, which apparently is now so hard to deal with that they need constant internet presence.  Or something.  I don't know.  All I know is, it's really hardcore goofy.

People are already walking into things because they have to have their gadgets in front of their faces at all times, and now somebody at google is hoping to convince us that having part of our brains otherwise engaged is a huge improvement.

Also, it looks stupid.  

I'm sorry, Sergey, but it does, it looks stupid.

I guarantee you if I set this silly contraption on my face I won't look like this.

Or this.

Or this.

For sure not like this.

Somebody imagines beautiful young women wearing this one-eyed contraption on their faces. 

I doubt it.  It'll probably be tech obsessed dudes who love gadgets.

I hope they also love eye strain.  And prefer the right side of the face because the left side has become boring.  

I hope I'm not deeply offending you if this is the gadget that will improve your entire life, give you better night vision, and bring your family closer together, but this is so dumb.  I don't want to talk to anybody wearing this thing.  Seriously.  

Please don't do this.  Actually live life.  Talk to people.  Look up your destination before you leave home.  Call the store and find out if they have the thing and how much it costs ahead of time.  Don't be that guy who is so self obsessed that he has to be constantly be checking something else that isn't in front of his face in real life.  Don't be self-obsessed and obnoxious.  Teenagers have a word for that kind of guy which is quite vulgar considering its origins, but dude, I have no other words.  Don't be the guy wearing the Douche Monocle.  

Thank you.

Now I'm going to check my iGadget to see if anybody wants to book lessons next week even though it's against my religion to do business on Sunday and then beg my family members to put down their iGadgets long enough for us to have some kind of meaningful conversation.

Ivan Earlis the Goat, Robert Plant, and Justin Bieber: a farm based comparison of sorts.

Ivan the Angora billy goat does not look like a rock star anymore. Remember how he likes to do rock star imitations?  He was doing his best 1973-era Robert Plant, with those luxurious ringlets.

And you just know when Beatrice and Mildred look at him, that's what they see! 

They can hardly even look at him, he's so stunning!

Just look at that big handsome fella!  

(Which one - Ivan or Jethro?)

Then the shearer came to the farm.

He zipped him out of his goat suit just like they do in the cartoons.

"What is happening to meeeeee?"

Now he doesn't look like Robert Plant anymore.  

Turns out, he's wee tiny under all that curly angora wool, and without his mutton chops or his beard.  I had kind of forgotten that he's only a year old.  

I've been telling him this just gives him another chance to become fabulous again.  And then again next fall when he gets the next crop of dignity shorn off.

"Hey, who's the young fart?"

His owner is very proud of him.  He was a good goat, especially since it was his first shearing.  He didn't nip the shearer's bum and he didn't fight.  If she was ever unsure as to whether or not she really wanted to be a billy goat owner, the little fella just ensured that he'll be a pet forever!

Even if he just went from Robert Plant to Justin Bieber.*

*Not that I have anything against the Biebs.  Other than, I don't understand his boring music or his bizarre pants.  He's a brilliant and ridiculously talented young fella and I sincerely hope he gets all his youthful silliness over with, returns to wearing actual clothes in public, and stops making bad decisions. I suspect the kid is better than all that.

Justin Bieber, wearing stupid pants

A plaid shirt.  I approve.

Oh wait... sigh.

Most boys at 19 are just coming out of their awkward phase, when all their limbs are the wrong length and their faces look different every day and their voices betray them.  This kid magically skipped all that.  His awkward phase involves being surrounded by sycophants, screaming girls and buckets of money. Oh and also, an entire empire of people whose paycheques depend on him.  Considering that, maybe he's handling life pretty reasonably.  I like to think he will get past this awkward phase and get on with making music and quit pretending he's all gansta-n-s**t cuz dude, I know the town he came from, (I'm there at least twice a week) and it is not a gansta-n-s**t kind of place.  This is a town of 30,000 with a unique combination of agriculture, Shakespeare Festival tourist traffic, a few factories, and a history of being a railway hub.  The shopping end of town is anchored by the Canadian Tire store and the TSC.   So all the big-city posturing and stupid clothes make him look kinda silly, far as I'm concerned.  

We shouldn't laugh at them - they're just young guys!  They'll grow up!

Ivan will grow back his curly coat... Justin will grow a beard someday... and Robert can continue emitting his aura of awesome.

Well now son, ya clean up good.  

AWESOME.  FOREVER.

Out of the three of them though, only Ivan has horns.  Rock on!!

She won't be the first kid to get her licence in a farm truck.

Since getting her beginner's licence almost two years ago, most of Annyong's driving has been in the pickup truck.  The big Mother Trucker.  The Honey Badger. She can drive it quite well.  She's learned to use her trailer mirrors to back it into a parking spot.  She understands why it can't be driven into a spot between two cars. She can get around a right turn without jumping the curb.

It's easy.  You sit up high and can see everything; you know where the front is, you know where the rear end is.  Even if both ends of the truck are several feet away from where you're sitting, you know it's there.  You can see everything around you.  It's got lovely power steering.  I mean, maybe it takes three times as long to park the thing, and a very cool head, but it can be done.

Besides it's automatic.  Pretty simple.

But Grandma's little Pontiac Vibe doesn't make any sense to her.  And we have to decide what she'll be driving for her road test.  She won't take the Jetta because even though she has learned to drive standard shift, she's not totally smooth with it yet.  Grandma generously offered her car.  She just didn't think it would be fair to ask a kid to drive that monster for a test.  Understandably so. I can brag about how well Annyong can manage the truck but let's face it.  It's a handful.

I talked to the examiner.  I explained how Annyong is used to the big heavy slow build of acceleration in the truck, not the quick jackrabbit start of the small car, and that while driving the car, the hood is not visible.  It's opposite.  She's been putting in time in the car, borrowing it as much as possible, and yet it just doesn't feel right.

I guess I'd forgotten temporarily where I live.

There are a lot of pickup trucks around here, and many of them have farm plates.

"She should drive what's she learned in, and what she's comfortable in," the examiner said.

"Really?  I mean... you won't laugh?  It's pretty rough looking."

She shrugged.  "I've seen it all."

I leaned on the desk, pointing out the list of flaws that will get a vehicle disqualified for use in a road test. "The left signal doesn't cancel.  I thought that might be a problem."

"Does it work?"

"Yeah, you just have to turn it off after you go around the corner."

"That's fine.  As long as it works," she said, leaning back in her chair.  I started to see the kind of deep calm and nerves of steel this woman has to have to do her job.

"And the driver's side door has a sticky latch."

"Does it open and close from both inside and outside?"

"Yeah... you really gotta reef on it though..."  I really need to get that fixed, I thought. Again.

"As long as it opens and closes it's fine."

"Well okay then.  I'll vacuum all the dog hair and horse hair out of it."

"Oh that'd be nice, since I have to wear a navy uniform." She smiled a little.  I got the feeling she's been in some nasty vehicles.  Coffee spills and cigarette butts and ashes - the very worst of automotive abuses! - and it's okay because this isn't a beauty contest.  It just has to meet the safety requirements.  Which it does.  Barely, but it's safe.  It runs beautifully.  All eight cylinders!  I'll do without a stereo (sad) and without air conditioning (that's what windows are for) but the what little money I have gets spent on things like brakes and new belts and filters, and tires.  Boring things like that.

We made another appointment for a test.  Back in Grandma's car, Annyong asked me if the emergency brake works in the truck.  "I don't even know where it is," she admitted.  Well that's because I have a bad habit of not really using it much.

"Yeah, it works."  Thought about if for a second.  "I'm pretty sure it does."

A few minutes down the road it occurred to Annyong, "So... we'll probably have to put the rear view mirror back on the inside of the windshield."

Oh yeah, that!  I don't think the examiner would find the humour in our family joke.  "Yes there is a rear view mirror.  It's right there under the seat."

It's cool.  A little blob of super glue and we're off to go get a driver's licence.

The parallel parking is going to be EPIC.

Grammy awards, deaths, bankers and barns - AMENDED AND EDITED

I wrote this whole big long post when I was in a slightly miserable messed up mood.  And it showed.  I hated the vibe of it.  Now I'm not a big fan of erasing what's happened or been written about, but I really don't feel like having that reminder of a crap mood hanging around.  So I'm taking it down.  Except for the part about Dave Grohl, because he's awesome.  So here you go.




Good ol Foo Fighters... after they slammed their way through a song, they threw on suit jackets over their Slayer T shirts, called it formal wear, and accepted their award.  Dave Grohl crowed about how they made this album in his garage!  which amused me because I'm sure his garage is, um, not exactly like the one your mom let you and your 14 year old buddies make your noise in.  I love him for getting excited about music made by people, not machines, even though I suspect computers still snuck into the process at some point, because that's how it's down now, sorry... but most of all, I love and respect Dave Grohl for his speech about picking up an instrument and learning how to play it!!!  And for music made with your heart and your mind.


Oh and here's the other brilliant Dave thing which I forgot to mention when I first wrote this post:

At the end of the Foo Fighters acceptance speech, the get-off-the-stage music started.  It was something called "dub-step" which apparently them kids today really dig, except for my kids, who have actual good taste in music.  Yep, I sound like I'm 87 and hate all that newfangled stuff that ain't even music at all dernit!!!

But seriously.  UNTZ UNTZ UNTZ UNTZ

And what did Good ol Grohl do?

Just as the camera panned away, with the untz untz untz happening, he ran back to the microphone just before the commercial break and yelled, "LONG LIVE ROCK AND ROLLLLL!"

Annyong and I threw our hands up in the air and started into a rousing chorus of DAAAAAAAAVE GRO-OHHHHHHHHLLLLL!





Anyways. I have to get Bucky and Annyong working on getting me that Awards Season Tree they keep threatening to make for me, with the little Grammy and Juno and Oscar ornaments hanging from its golden branches...

SPIN THE BLACK CIRCLE

Oh yeah.  Vinyl.  Good ol' grooves.

What you are seeing on that turntable is... JOHNNY CASH AT SAN QUENTIN.

On the back of the album sleeve is my Auntie's maiden name, and the date: January 1970.  

That makes this record older than me by about 11 months.  I wasn't even an idea yet.

It's been years since we've had this record player working.  On the weekend, Jethro and Bucky finally tracked down a store, luckily not too far from home, that sells this obscure item known as a stylus.  They had to buy the entire cartridge, the whole black thing at the end of the arm.  Jethro didn't mind, even though it was kind of pricey (we'd already turned down an opportunity to go see RDJ at the movies because we didn't think we could shell out over $60...) because it's a good piece of gear.  Might even be worth more than the whole record player.  haha.  

We've got this nice record collection, made up of a combination of the following:

My record buying years:

-Duran Duran

-Tears For Fears

-The Clash

-Led Zeppelin

Jethro's record buying years:

-Ozzy Osbourne

-Black Sabbath

-Led Zeppelin

-Yngwie Malmsteen (I'm not even kidding)

My parent's record buying years:

-Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass

-Baja Marimba Band (that is a seriously great record)

-Marty Robbins

-a few obscure gospel bands/ cousins and other relatives who sang hymns and got some vinyl pressed

My sister's record buying years:

-Bryan Adams

-Blondie

My mom's sister's record buying years:

-Johnny Cash

-Gordon Lightfoot

-Joni Mitchell

What an amazing collection!

We've got a Bill Cosby comedy album next to Cyndi Lauper's She's So Unusual.

Bon Jovi, Slippery When Wet and Simon & Garfunkel, The Sounds Of Silence.

(I am going to name a critter Garfunkel some day.)

Van Halen, 1984 beside XTC, English Settlement (another great record, obscure in my neck of the woods)

Forgotten Rebels and The Cure.

INXS, Listen Like Thieves and ABBA...pick one, I had a serious ABBA phase between ages 9 and 11!

We've got a Molly Hatchett record.

We've got the Iron Butterfly sleeve but Jethro turned Innagaddadavida into a frisbee about 30 years ago.

We've got two copies of Zenyatta Mondatta by the Police.

People, we've got a Sigue Sigue Sputnik record.  I'm not kidding.


ISN'T THIS FUN!???!

It's been so long since we could play records.  We've been in this house for over two years and only recently got our stereo system set up.  This is a temporary home... we weren't even planning on being here this long.  But we missed our music.  Now we can watch TV, watch a movie on DVD, I don't think we can play our Wallace & Gromit VHS ("everybody knows the moon's made of cheese...") and I don't think we can play cassettes (yes we still have those too, how do you think we listen to all the Van Halen?) but I do think we can play CDs... there are four remotes and I'm still not sure how to turn the TV on --seriously, four remotes and I'm still getting off my butt to hit the channel button? We've got an iPod dock hooked up so we can drop an iGadget in there and listen to a playlist.

And now, WE CAN PLAY RECORDS!

Last night Bucky discovered Blizzard Of Ozz.

We'd given him the disc last year and were shocked to hear how different it sounded.  Apparently somebody thought it would be a good idea to re-record the bass and drums.  We thought it was a terrible idea and decided to ostracize that CD, promising Bucky we'd get the ol' record player fired up.

So I gave Bucky the tutorial on Dropping The Needle.

There's the hissing and crackling, and there's Randy Rhoads, and we grinned.  The record skipped.  I giggled.  "It's the real thing, kids!  There's nothing else like it!"

Jethro later said, "I played the crap outta that record.  I bought it used, and then I played the crap out of it."

Well kids, it's not perfect.  The turntable has a nasty ground hum that can be heard between tracks.  There will be noises coming out of those vinyl grooves that aren't music.

But the music is there.

It isn't compressed, it isn't crushed down into MP3 files.  It doesn't have any of that ProTooled sandpaper-on-the-ears bullcrap.  It wasn't mastered so loud it hurts.  Music shouldn't hurt.  You should be able to turn it up and enjoy it without suffering hearing damage.  Jethro has been devoting his career to making good-sounding music and making a stand against music that just sounds like a wall of fuzz.  A lot of teenagers have grown up on recordings that have been processed to death.  And they listen to slammed files with no dynamics and way too much noise.  They listen to it loud, in earbuds.  They don't really know how recorded music is meant to sound.  Half the time they've only got one earbud in, which makes Jethro tear his hair out, because he spends 16 hours a day mixing in stereo -- as in, each side has something different going on -- and these guys are only listening to one side.  They're missing half of it.

Let's face it: the entire music industry is a broken rusted shadow of its former self.  We know this first hand.  We live it.

And Bucky and Annyong go to school, stand on their little soapboxes and proclaim all of this to their misguided peers.... and are met with uncomprehending stares.

Ours aren't allowed to have a million small files of music on their iPods.  They are allowed to have like, a couple hundred, that are in big files and sound good.

So we listened to Ozzy last night.  Wine is fine, but liquor is quicker.  Tonight we'll listen to the story of Mr Crowley.  Tomorrow night we'll listen to side 2 of Johnny Cash cussing his way through a set of songs to the appreciative howls of a bunch of prisoners.

GOOD TIMES.

It is far from perfect, vinyl, but I don't think we've reached a perfect method of recording music yet in the first hundred years of the art and science.  Records are better than wax cylinders.  Besides, wax cylinder players are even harder to find than record player needles.

I keep a close watch on this heart of mine... I keep my eyes wide open all the time...

Maybe I was in the right time at the right place twenty years ago: Me and the Music Explosion of 1991

My daughter lamented recently that she wishes she was a teenager in an earlier decade.  Anything other than this one.  This is boring.  Everything happened in the 60s and 80s and 70s. Cool stuff was going on in the 50s.  People looked fabulous in the 30s and 40s.

She told me I was lucky to be a young adult in the 90s.  My first reaction was that I actually missed much of the 90s because of all the gestating and lactating.  haha.  ha.

But maybe she's right.  Maybe I am lucky to have been there.  Yes, I spent the latter half of the decade completely immersed in my children, and I wouldn't trade that for anything, but I had a few good years in the early 90s there.

September 1991: I was newly married and starting my first year of college.  I was a little country bumpkin with no idea how to read a bus schedule (but that deserves its own story) and was scared silly about the whole school thing.  I was The Married Chick; it was funny seeing the young dudes' faces change when they heard the word married.

But even chicks with wedding rings can go to the school pub.  And I did.  The pub had a couple of big screens up on the walls with videos playing.  Coming from a home with no cable TV, I was way behind on my video watching.  So I sat there being fascinated and creeped out by Ozzy Osbourne's No More Tears.  I was an Ozzy fan.  Still am. Despite his regular fascinating creepiness.

But something new was about to whack us all upside the head.  That month, that first month of my first (and only) college year, THIS HAPPENED.

 from amazon.com

A scumbaggy looking trio of slackers put out this little album that sounded like somebody took the history of punk music, a good portion of the Beatles, and metal's buzzy distortion and stuck it in a dirty blender, then set the thing on HIGH.  

Now the thing is, I used to be enough of a rebel that I was wary of liking any music just because everybody else did or just because it's on the radio all the time or the guy in Rolling Stone says it's good. I did the same thing a couple years earlier with Guns N Roses.  But the problem was that despite Appetite For Destruction being one of the most offensive records I'd ever heard it was also one of the best.  I couldn't deny the energy and the melodies and the intensity.  It didn't take long before I just completely gave up and gave in.  

Funny thing is, all this time, I've never owned a copy of this record.  Never had to.  First all my friends had it (on cassette!) and to this day any rock radio station won't go more than a few hours without playing a song off of Nevermind.  

Hey, wanna feel old?  That cute baby has facial hair now.  

(the whole article is here)

Also he's taken up wearing pants.  How things change, eh?

So, I was around for that piece of history.

That same month, another huge album hit the air.

from http://sleevage.com

This had me going givvidawaynah nonstop.  I had heard of this band; I remember waking up to the radio one morning convinced that Ozzy Osbourne and Stevie Wonder had done a collaboration for the song "Higher Ground."  For about two hours after that I was thinking, "How in the hell did that happen?"  But it didn't.  It was these guys.  And that's all I knew about them.  

For me, this album kind of is the soundtrack of Art School.  I threw a lot of pottery to this record. And by throw I mean, y'kno, stuck a lump of clay on the wheel and squeezed it.  I squeezed mud to Red Hot Chili Peppers.  

You know what also happened at that time? This piece of brilliance.  We howled with delight when we saw the cover!

from sleevage.com

Metallica was unavoidable in high school.  I think even the preppies listened to Metallica.  And yes, we spent our hard earned art student/ assistant recording engineer cash on this disc.  I did all my drawing assignment homework to it and wrote lyrics all over the cover of my sketch book, like a high school student.  It actually dropped in August but I was busy driving across Canada with my new husband, through landscapes where the radio scrolled all the way through and found nothing.  Back in Ontario I got all dosed up on Metallica.  They're not even my favourite band but I loved this record.  

Then one day, sitting in the student building pub, I heard this magnificent noise. Huge guitars and frantic drumbeats, and bags and bags of bass.  Whaaaaat?  Interesting!  I tried to look over the top of the crowd to see what was going on up there on the screen.

Oh look, this video has some of my favourite stuff in it. 

Well, shirtless long haired rock stars?  Flames?  Musical instruments?  ...car parts???  What is all that?  Tell me more!  

"So... THIS is the Soundgarden I have read about but had not heard, because my local radio station doesn't play anything other than big-label music, scientifically created in a lab for maximal hit potential?  Tell me more!"

This record ended up being one of my favourites OF ALL TIME.

lyrics.wikia.com

Their videos got played a lot in the pub.  Funny that I remember that so clearly when I think of my college experience.  You'd think I was in there every day.  This video totally blew my mind.  All strobe lights and desert and apparently this dude doesn't own any shirts.  Being an impoverished college student I really had sympathy.

image from interscope.com

Also I was concerned that maybe he wasn't eating enough, being all ribsy and all, and maybe he should drop by the student pub on Thursday evenings for cheap chicken wings.

I can't shut up about Badmotorfinger.  It was all Drop D tuning and messed up time signatures, making it so much more complex and interesting than a lot of the rock music that came before it.  Jethro eventually started calling Soundgarden "the Black Sabbath of the 90s" which was, coming from him, a compliment.  

It didn't even occur to me at the time that there was some really cool stuff happening in rock music.  I was just digging what was going on.  You rarely know history is being made at the time.

Meanwhile, I woke up every morning to hear "November Rain" on the radio, which I thought was a total bummer to be a Guns N Roses song.  I only liked the ending.  I never had a copy of either one of the Use Your Illusions either.  Even though part of it had been recorded at the studio my Jethro was working at at that time.  But that's a whole other story.  In any case Guns N Roses started to really bum me out in 1991.

Then U2 dropped Achtung Baby which my friends and I had to listen to nonstop at every house party ever.  Brilliant album.  Again, never owned a copy... never needed to because it's gloriously ubiquitous!

The other big house party hit was Lenny Kravitz.  I used to have the lyrics for Mama Said memorized.

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Man, Lenny was so freakin' cool.  I wanted to dress like that guy every day.  But I wasn't that kind of cool.




It wasn't all good though.  Freddie Mercury died.  That was a sobering loss that put a damper on the party.


The next year I finally heard Pearl Jam.  Their first album, Ten, is the kind of record that puts me in a mood instantly.  It's a record best listened to on a quiet day, holding still and listening.

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And yeah, there was a time when I had the lyrics for Evenflow memorized.  It's all gone now.

And also Alice In Chains happened.  Guess where they were from?  Seattle.  Just like the other ground-breaking bands who released albums in that three month span at the end of 1991.  It was a thing.  

rateyourmusic.com

It's kind of interesting to think about the convergence of ideas and collaborations that feed into something huge.


Somewhere in there I remember being in the kitchen of our sketchy apartment above the Chinese takeaway/ Portuguese hair salon and listening to the radio.... commentary on the fall of the Berlin Wall.  I was very withdrawn into my own world, and the world of art school, but this was a piece of news that sunk in.  

Because music was such a huge part of my world, and still is, these are the things that stick in my mind.

So this evening as we were doing our barn chores, my daughter and I talked about things she'll remember from her teenage years.

America's first black president.

Prince William's wedding.

Muse at Lollapalooza.

The Black Keys.

Myles Kennedy.

And she probably won't even know at the time what could end up being monumental in her life.

Swagger and Spit: A Hick Chic Guide

Cute Stuff, who lived a few houses away from us when we lived in town, brought his Mom out to the Ol' Homestead for a visit this week. 

Cute Stuff knows where I keep the extra cowboy boots in the barn.  

Here we are going out to catch a horse.  He is wearing cowboy boots.  I am wearing chicken-white legs.

He had to swagger.  It's what you do when you're rocking the cowboy boots.  

The kid's a natural.  

Cute Stuff started talking about spurs.  He asked me if I have spurs.  Yeah I have spurs.  His green eyes got real big.  Do you USE them?  Not very often.  Only on Phoenix.  Cute stuff had this idea that I get on my horse and jab him in the guts repeatedly.  So I asked him where he's getting his info from and got reminded that I am totally unhip when he told me about a video game called Red Dead Redemption.  

Yay, another source of western stereotype misinformation.  But guess what - Cute Stuff can now tell the vid-kids that he has actually worn spurs.  For real, dude.

I wouldn't let him ride my horses with spurs.  Nobody uses spurs on them but me, and no, I don't stab them.  They're just reminders, which I explained to him.  But heck, spurs are good for photo- ops!

And while we're at it, let's get you a hat.

Mine's already too small for him.

I handed him Jethro's.  He set my teensy hat on top of my head while I buckled up my spur straps.  

This led to a very important lesson:  How To Wear A Stetson.  As you can see in the above pic, he first put it on set back on his head.  Can't do that.  You'll look like a NOOB, I told him.  Dead giveaway that you're new at this.  

You gotta hold the crease in your hand like this and then set the sweatband, that leather strip inside the hat, right on your forehead.  Then slide it down onto your head.  It's gotta be right on your forehead.  And don't jam it down by grabbing the brim by the sides.  And it's a real Stetson so careful, cowpoke.

He got it down right quick.  Like he's been wearing it for years.  

Like a cow-boss. 

Seriously, he wasn't even posing for that picture.  

Of course, once you've got the hat, the boots, the spurs and the swagger, all that's left (besides the horse) is the spit.  It's dusty out there.  You gotta spit.  

And of course it's best if your thumbs are hooked in your belt buckle.  If you had a belt buckle.  

SPURS.

And attitude.

Hadda hock up a few good loogies.  (Do you call 'em loogies out west???)

He's very good at spitting.  I hardly had to teach him anything.  

I'm telling you, even if he only gets out here once a year, it's worth it.  He needs to reach his Inner Cowboy.  

And we have one more horse to cuddle now.

The spurs came off.  We swapped out the Stetson for a Troxel  (what, it's Ontario, we can't cowboy-up all the time.  And also legally I have to slap a helmet on anybody under 18) and put Cute Stuff on a horse.  He still looks cool.  

Look at him, sitting there like he does this all the time.

He'll grow into the boots and the hat. 

And I've got bigger boots, so he can keep visiting for years to come!