It is Sunday evening and I just opened this multi-disc Led Zeppelin live collection, How the West Was Won.
I can’t even imagine what these concerts must have been like. Holy shit — just so good. Mind-blowingly good. I’ll bet a lot of auditory nerves were well-damaged those evenings without a single complaint.
Damn I love having a nice stereo. Really the only good reason, other than having a yard for a dog, for owning a house.
I just finished listening to Coda earlier today. Also just amazing.
Yes, I’ve decided to make the 1000th post on this blog about our dog, Riley. Our cat, Lefty, approves. After all, Lefty has been the topic of many blog posts, and he is big enough to say “Hey, yeah, Riley has been a good boy and deserves a post.”
In October we will have had Riley for 3 years. The time has passed fast. It doesn’t seem possible.
Honestly, I have always liked dogs but never had the desire to actually have one. Too much responsibility.
However, my wife has always wanted a dog and fell in love with her sister’s sheltie many years ago. After going through cancer treatment at the height of the Covid pandemic, then getting well enough to finish her PhD dissertation, she said “OK, I want to get my dog.” After such a superhuman effort, how could I say no? Truth is I wouldn’t have said no anyway. I want her to have whatever she wants.
She said she didn’t want to leave this world never having known the love of a dog. That was enough for me.
I could write a book already on our time so far with this dog. From the first 6 or 8 months which were just hard (neither of us had ever had a dog before much less a 9-week old puppy) to now it has been a true journey of discovery.
This dog is just so great. He loves everyone and everything. He wants to make friends with any living creature he encounters. From human, to other dog, to cat, to rat, he sees a new friend in everyone. He’s sweet and I’ve never seen any sort of aggression from him at all. He loves to have jobs, from watching to see what’s happening in front of the house and alerting us to “trouble” to bringing in the mail, he loves to work. He’s goofy and playful. And he is attached to my wife. He is her constant shadow. Nothing pleases me more than this simple fact.
She put it best, after reading or hearing this somewhere. They have short lives. It is our job to make every day a great day for him. That is what we try to do. He doesn’t ask for much. He just wants to be with us. What do I want for him? I want him to have a long and happy sheltie life, which is around 12 years or maybe a little more, and for every day to be good for him. I want him to always feel secure and loved. And I’m going to steal this last one from my wife and expand it to include me — when the day comes that he breaks our hearts (may that be a long time from now) I want us both to be here, still, together, to feel it.
This is post 999 for this blog. I had considered making it Post 1000, but I might just post a picture of my cat for that.
For the last few months I’ve been frequenting this message board, 32-Bit Cafe. I’m amazed at the creativity and honesty I see on the sites there. It is beautiful. Seriously – just so great. This is what the internet should be about.
I’ve been blogging for 20 years. Longer, really, but this blog will be 20 next year. When I started it I had no idea that in 20 years personal blogs would be the last refuge of the “good” internet.
But they are.
Young people, at least some of them, are rediscovering the power of blogging. The 32-Bit Cafe is but one example. These are the cool kids. Seriously. These are the youth that recognize the bullshit of the current corporate internet and have found a way to express themselves away from social media. They find community, they create, they use the internet the way it really should be used — with some level of personal autonomy. These are not the kids trying to “leverage AI” to make the world a worse place. These are the young people who care about authenticity.
They get it. This gives me hope.
I am, as I sit here typing this, 60 years old. I plan to continue until the day I can’t type anymore. Oh, I might have to change platforms at some point, but this blog will continue.
Pandemic Parking lot is no more.
This place, where I spent dozens if not hundreds of hours skating during and after the pandemic, has been destroyed as they totally rebuild the city hall complex. Yes, this was the south parking lot of our municipality’s city hall. It joins my freestyle practice spot, which was on the other side of the city hall, on the east side of the public library. They even destroyed the brick banks that ran along this sidewalk (yeah – the sidewalk is gone too),
Here is a picture of my poor old parking lot today…
To say I am unhappy about this does not capture the depth of my loss. I have no idea if any of the new shit will be OK to skate when it is done about 2 years from now. This place was about 5 minutes from my house. It was peaceful in the evenings and weekends. Both the freestyle spot and Pandemic Parking Lot gave me the solitude I really love for skating.
Yes, I’m being kind of childish about this. I don’t care. Fuck progress. Progress is bad. Change is bad. When things are good they should stay good.
I’m a 60-year old skateboarder and I am not – fucking – happy.
Now I have to find some other places nearby to skate. Places with some shade. Places with no damned kids running around. Places I can play my music loud through my bluetooth speaker and not disturb anyone. I will likely be forced to go up to Allen to the skatepark, which is annoying. It is a 20 minute drive under best conditions and there are people there.
One would think that finding a simple parking lot would be easy, but as my friends Chris and Brian have noted, a good skate spot is more than the concrete. It’s the energy of the place. The vibe. The way it makes you feel. It’s not that easy.
So, we shall see. Like I said, it will be at least two years until this complex reopens. I suspect it will be longer. Due to a bad fire in a server room a few years ago the entire city hall building was torn down and it is being moved to a different position on the land. The public library, which opened the year I moved here as a child, has been gutted and all the surrounding area has been ripped up. I can’t imagine the library will be done in two years. There’s just too much to do. And to totally build a new city hall? Longer. It has to be.
It’s silly to place too much value on a skate spot. We skateboarders know this, but we always do it anyway. It’s like getting a dog or a cat and saying “I’m not going to get so attached this time” and then of course you get more attached. This parking lot was my getaway. When the pandemic started I could go there and skate. When my wife got cancer a couple of months later it was a place close to home where I could skate and feed my soul, but get home quickly if needed. That semi-shitty concrete meant a lot to me. At this spot I reinvented the way I skate. A new way to skate for a time when I couldn’t end up in an ER full of Covid patients. A way I loved so much I still prefer it to how I skated before. Honestly, sometimes I would go there, skate, sit on the curb and cry, and then keep skating.
There’s lots of footage of this spot in my Vimeo library. This, however, is my favorite video I made from my time skating there. Simple, beautiful Fall sky. I think it captures everything.
So in this post I’m going to walk back my statement about all the young people’s music being shit. It’s not. In the last few months I’ve seen two opening acts that I thought were really good. I was really referring to the music that is actually popular with the masses of young people, but I also admit I really have no idea what 20-somethings like. Basically I’m talking out of my ass, based on shit like Beyonce and T. Swift. But the truth is that even when all the greatness of Kraftwerk, Gang of Four, and so many other great bands was being created in the late 70s and early 80s some absolutely ghastly shit was also being produced.
That is my assessment, and a music-historian I am not. I’m just a dirty old skateboarder who likes his punk, post-punk, electronica, and classic rock. And if you are a Beyonce or Swift fan — well — not everything has to be for me, so carry on with your horrible music. Enjoy it, because life is too short to not enjoy things. Same for fans of all the new country stuff or whatever. Again – I’m talking out of my butt because I couldn’t name a single Beyonce or Swift song if my life depended on it. NOT. ONE. For the record, Swift apparently is generous with her crew which makes her a good person in my opinion. Beyonce – I have no idea – but that’s not my world. She did apparently make a country album, and as that may have upset racists it pleases me greatly.
So, to sum up —
Some of the kids are alright.
This band – Othering – opened for Gang of Four. Two guys. One guy played synths and operated the electronics and played guitar, and the other guy played drums. They were really good. I have no problem with people using electronics, actually. These blokes wrote all the music, programmed the synths, and really were great. The drummer as absolutely fantastic. I loved ’em. I don’t think this music video does them justice for how much they actually rock, but here it is.
Then we saw this band Rocket open for Ride a few months ago. Super band! When I saw them it filled me with hope — young people making great music with guitars, bass, and drums. Honestly, I thought they were better than Ride by quite a lot.