Category: whatever

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Record Shopping 3-Day Weekend

We are halfway through Memorial Day weekend.

If there is anything better than a three-day weekend, it can only be a four -day or more weekend, vacation, or simply being retired.

Yesterday I spent the morning skateboarding, then we chilled the rest of the day, listened to music, and just generally relaxed.

Today we got up, bought some coffee and took the pup for a walk at the nature preserve, came home and relaxed with more coffee. Then we drove out to Forever Young record store in Grand Prairie and did some record shopping, my wife procuring two excellent albums and I bought 1978’s All Mod Cons, by the Jam, one of my favorite bands. I need to delve into Paul Weller’s other material. Note to self. Genius is genius.

The more I look into it, the more I realize how much of my favorite music was created before 1980. I feel kind of dumb to have not realized this before, but that post-punk era was just so good!

It is, as I type these exact words right now, 6:29pm. With the lovely three-day weekend I have been able to relax, have fun, enjoy my family, and not feel rushed at all. I worked from home on Friday, so the Tyranny of Laundry is not currently oppressing me.

As the fateful hour of 8pm approaches, the usual feeling of Sunday night depression is not seeping into my psyche. As we walked our dog about 20 minutes ago I was thinking about this and coming to the realization of how much middle-class misery is caused by feeling like one must rush from one thing to another. Constant time pressure cooker. To some extent we do this to ourselves, but only to feel like we actually have a life outside of work. I am lucky I actually love what I do and have a great employer, something 99.999999999% of people can’t say, but still I’d like to work less.

Aside from buying these records today, my holiday consumerism included ordering a higher-quality cartridge for our turntable, the red Ortofon 2M. My friend Dale tells me this will make a noticeable difference from the stock cartridge that came on our turntable. Looking forward to checking out the new records with the new needle.

3 record albums
3 great albums. Yay for us!
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No AI

I suppose this goes without saying, but you will NEVER find a word on this blog written by AI. Nor will you find an AI-generated image or sound.

If you use AI to write you have given up and are making the world a worse place. Fuck you.

That is all.

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Interest Overkill

I started watching the new Daredevil: Born Again series on Disney Plus. I loved the Netflix DD series. I have watched three episodes, weeks ago, and I feel no need to watch the rest. Which is weird, because not only is it great, but DD is my favorite Marvel character. Charlie Cox does an incredible job as Matt Murdock/Daredevil.

I’m sure that eventually I’ll watch it. This is not confined just to this show. It is almost any show on TV. I watched a couple of episodes of Andor. It was great. I never finished it. The list goes on.

I think there are a couple of things going on. First, over-saturation of the nerd media market. There’s just too much. Way too much. Second, I have my own creative endeavors and hobbies. I prefer to use my the precious few hours of my precious short lifespan to do those things rather than watch shows. This weekend I listened to a lot of music while I did some writing. When I was too tired to write last night I watched Aliens (for the 5 millionth time) on Blu-Ray. Watching something for the 5 millionth time is comforting. It’s still great but the fatigued brain doesn’t have to keep up with a lot of new stuff.

Honestly, the same thing is happening in most areas of interest, I think. In skateboarding you can watch completely nuts skateboarding 24/7 and never watch the same clip twice. All stuff that normal humans will never be able to and really why would anyone want to. I have no desire to launch myself down a set of 20 stairs, which is actually pretty tame compared to some of the daredevil shit going on now. It’s boring and not relatable. I always love seeing my friends skating. But that’s it. Even pretty tame stuff, like some kid learning a new freestyle trick — I’ve seen it all before. Not interesting. Don’t care. When I was 14 I didn’t try to force the whole world to watch my learning process.

Even with tabletop roleplaying games you can swim in the sea of new material, thoughts, opinions, and and media all day, every day.

In each of these areas I find myself reducing my circle of contact. Tighter groups. Fewer websites. Less social media.

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The Death of Pandemic Parking Lot

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…

destroyed parking lot
Click for larger view of this fucking devastation.

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.

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Working from Home

I’m working from home today.

I had a pretty good workout at aikido last night. Enough to make me sleep really well, though I am a bit tired. So it’s nice to be at home, getting some work done, without the noise of the office  all around me. Sitting here on the couch while my wife runs some errands, with the dog and cat in here asleep. No TV on. Nice weather outside so the door to the patio is open. Peaceful. Easy to relax and get some things done.

The war against people working from home is bullshit. If people can work from home once or twice a week I think it is good for their mental health. It’s great to be able to get a load of laundry done during your work day. It’s nice to take five minutes too write a blog post or play with your dog. It’s nice to not have fluorescent lights assaulting your eyes all day. It’s nice to not have to rush out of the house in the morning and face traffic. Most of all, it’s nice to not have to “perform”, turn on the extrovert disguise, or otherwise meet the social expectations of the office once or twice a week. Even if you like your coworkers and your job, which I do,  everyone can sometimes use a break.