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.
