A.B. Kelly

Posts By A.B. Kelly

Wombat’s Annual Concert Review

A.B. Kelly · January 4, 2018 · Blog Entries, Musings · Blues Traveler, concerts, Mumford and Sons, Neil Diamond · One Comment

I’m starting this year with a slightly different retrospective. I have no friggin’ clue what the hell I did over the past twelve months or what I would like to do for the next twelve. I have a three-year old daughter at home, and both her long-term memory and planning are definitely contagious. Also, since I stopped writing for a large portion 2017 (see above: three-year old), there’s no better time to post about what I did last summer. I’m not likely to remember these things much longer.

Wait, was I saying something?

Anyway, last summer, I saw three more old-dude concerts: Mumford and Sons in June, Blues Traveler in July, and Neil Diamond in August. I know technically Mumford and Sons aren’t old dudes, but most of their fans are.

Each act was one I had seen in concert before, so it allows me to put them into a little perspective.

Mumford and Sons: This was my second viewing of Mumford. If you like their music, you should see them in concert. There always seems to be a divide between how people want concerts to sound. Some people want the songs to sound exactly like they do on the album, so they can sing along. Others figure they can listen to the album whenever they want and, for the price of a concert ticket, they want the songs to be distinctively live.

Mumford and Sons seems to split the difference. The first time I saw them, my wife asked what they were like. I said, “They sound exactly like they do on the album, only moreso.” She didn’t understand how that could be, so this time, I took her. After that show, I asked her what she thought. She said, “They sound exactly like they do on the album, only moreso.”

Every harmony, every chord, every mandolin solo, is as close an approximation of the recorded versions as you will find. You can sing along, if you want. Each note will begin exactly where it is supposed to. A couple might go on a skosh longer, but it shouldn’t be hard to figure out which ones.

I sang along at parts. How can you NOT join in with thousands of people singing “I really fucked it up this time”?

But really, you don’t want to sing along too much, because you’ll miss the “moreso.”

There are a few things that define Mumford and Sons. The emotion and the drive of their music. I don’t mean the emotion of their lyrics (see below: Blues Traveler). In fact, I have to ignore the very obvious born-again lyrics to “I Will Wait” every time I belt along at the top of my lungs.

But I have to belt it, all the same, because of the emotion of the music. It feels like it’s at a fast tempo, but it’s really not. Maybe mandolins can be strummed faster than guitars? I don’t know. Speaking of things I don’t know, is there a difference between a banjo and a mandolin or is it just based on the genre, like a violin and a fiddle?

Anyway, I have always found Mumford’s music invigorating. Even some of their slower songs seem to push forward rather than lay back. I wasn’t a fan of “Wilder Mind” when it came out, because I worried they were becoming Coldplay, but after a few listens, I realized that there was still a lot going on throughout that album.

All of what makes Mumford is on display when they’re in concert. It’s louder, obviously, but same as with tempo, I don’t think volume alone accounts for their draw. And seeing Marcus Mumford sing the lyrics, which whether I agree with them or not, are very personal to him, adds an extra layer of emotion. I don’t know how he has the voice to sing like that night after night.

Like on the album, but moreso.

I have two slight issues with my two Mumford and Sons concerts. The first time, they played a bunch of songs that they were working on for a future album. I liked them, but they were nowhere to be found when I saw them eight months later. I hope those songs, and a forthcoming album, will be appearing soon.

My other issue is the song “Winter Winds.” It is my favorite Mumford and Sons song. They have not played it either time. A quick perusal of setlists shows that they do not play it very often. Marcus, if you’re reading this, put that bad boy into the rotation.

The venue we saw Mumford and Sons at was pretty cool. It was at “The Joint” (gosh, I wonder what that name is hinting at?), a venue inside the Hard Rock Casino in Las Vegas. Fun place, with only a couple of problems for bands with aging fans. It’s general admission, so we all had to stand in line or else we’d have to stand at the back. My wife and I arrived at the casino more than two hours before the concert started. We were going to grab a bite to eat and maybe gamble and drink a bit, but thought we would check the line first, just to be sure.

Holy shit, the line stretched for fifteen miles! Okay, maybe not that long, but in all honesty, the end of the line was in the parking garage. Meaning outside. In Vegas. In June. Yikes. Extra trooper points for my wife, though, who stood there for a half-hour holding our spot while I went in search of the elusive beer.

When they finally let us into the venue, not only was it general admission, but it was standing room only. Twenty years ago, that would’ve had mosh pit written all over it. But this was Mumford and Sons.I’m 43 and I probably lowered the average age by a year or two. So it was basically just a bunch of old people standing around for an hour.

Then for another hour during the absolute douchebag of an opening act. Seriously, he was not talented. And he was kind of an asshole in between songs. At one point he said he was from New York City and there was a smattering of boos. He seemed shocked.

“Who the hell would boo New York City?”

Umm, everybody who isn’t from New York City, dude.

“You guys are just jealous.”

And THAT’S why we all hate douchebags from New York.

But the venue was actually nice. Accoustics were good and you could get as close to the band as you wanted, body space notwithstanding. And I was even able to get a little bit of booze, too.

Holy shit, did I just pay $48 for a margarita and a Jack & Coke?

Neil Diamond

Neil Diamond is also an act I’ve seen once before. Not two years in a row, like Mumford and Sons. I think the first time I saw old Neil, Mumford was still just a son.

My first Neil Diamond concert was a bit of an aberration. I had always wanted to see him, but the price point was too high. Then the city of Stockton was opening a new arena. Stockton is a city in the central valley of California whose main claim to fame is a murder rate that rivals Detroit’s. But they’ve been trying to revitalize the downtown with a brand new minor-league ballpark, single-A but nicer than a number of AAA ballparks I’ve seen, and a 10,000-seat arena for a minor-league hockey team (I’ll be curling there at the end of the month!). Both venues, even a decade later, are beautiful. The downtown still sucks.

When the arena was first opening, they wanted a big name to open it. Last year, when Sacramento opened The Golden One Center, they brought in Paul McCartney. But Sir Paul wouldn’t be caught dead in Stockton, so their big-namer was Neil Diamond. But there was still a problem, namely that the tickets were still pushing $100 for a city that is notoriously low on the socioeconomic scale. Oh, and it was a septuagenarian playing for a city with less than five percent of its population college-educated.

So Neil Diamond wasn’t selling and the grand opening of the brand new Stockton Arena was barreling toward a quarter-full opening night. The city manager had promised Neil Diamond $1 million to open the arena, with the city reimbursing whatever ticket sales failed to provide. Except that particular arrangement wasn’t run by the city council. The city manager lost his job over that one. It was bad.

Except it was great for ticket price purposes. With about three days to go until the concert, somebody decided they didn’t want a lackluster opening night, so they lowered prices. All of a sudden it was $25 to see a classic rocker. I was in. Part of the fun of that first concert was trying to deduce who around me had paid full price for the same seats I got for the price of a pizza.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t impressed with Neil Diamond that first go around. It felt like he was going through the motions. Maybe he was pissed that half the people in the audience were only seeing him because he cost less than the tank of gas they had used to get to the concert. Maybe he was just performing one of his 150 concerts a year for the 38th year in a row.

The give and take between he and his background singers felt forced and there was virtually no interaction with the audience. His clever lyrics about UB40 stealing “Red, Red Wine” seemed a little less avant garde twenty years after said cover of said song.

My one takeaway from that first Neil Diamond concert was that he had changed the words of “Desiree” so that the girl was nearly half his age, instead of nearly twice his age. I guess that was funny when he was in his sixties, but now I kinda want him to go back to the original. If, at the age of 77, he’s becoming a man with a 144-year old lady, that’s pretty impressive. Not hot, but impressive!

I’m glad I gave Neil Diamond a second shot, because this year, he put on a really good show. It was at the aforementioned Golden One Center, the new Sacramento arena that Sacramentans said they didn’t need but has already hosted at least ten acts that never would’ve come to Sacramento before. It was Neil Diamond’s 50th anniversary tour, and that might’ve helped him find his love for performing again. Maybe he was able to pick whatever the hell he wanted to sing. He performed a couple of very early songs that have been out of the rotation since “Hot August Nights.”

He played the two sides of the arena off against each other to see who would cheer more, and at one point he turned and sang an entire song directly to the people that were cheering the loudest. I had always heard he was a big showman like this, so maybe I had just seen him on a bad night before. Maybe it was all the fault of those assholes who thought he was only worth a $25 ticket.

Unfortunately, he still played the old, tired, UB40 riff in “Red, Red Wine.” Dude, Neil. It’s been 35 years. Let it go. You don’t reference The Monkees when you sing “I’m a Believer.”

No report back on the age of Desiree this time.

Blues Traveler

I’ve been a huge Blues Traveler for most of my adult life. I listened to them constantly throughout my twenties and a good portion of my thirties. Right up until the time I discovered Mumford and Sons. I joked that if I saw Mumford (my current favorite bad) in June and Traveler (favorite band of my twenties) in July, I couldn’t wait to see the favorite band from my teens in August.

Still waiting for that Beatles reunion tour…

While 2017 marked only my second time seeing Neil Diamond (turned out he was the August concert in question) and Mumford and Sons, I don’t think I could count the number of times I’ve seen Blues Traveler. Probably somewhere between ten and twenty.

I’ve seen Blues Traveler opening for Allman Bros Band in arenas. I’ve camped out to see Blues Traveler playing both days at a weekend festival at the Laguna Seca racetrack. I saw Blues Traveler in the wave pool at the Mandalay Bay, maybe the greatest venue ever.

This time, though, didn’t rank quite as high as a pool in Vegas. It was at the California State Fair. The very same venue that has hosted a Taylor Swift cover band. Ugh.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the concerts at the State Fair. I plan which day I’ll go to the Fair based on who’s playing. I’ve seen Huey Lewis, Air Supply, Eddie Money, and Weird Al Yancovic there. It’s a standard stopping spot for bands on the Indian Casino circuit.

To say I was upset Blues Traveler had fallen so far would be inaccurate. It’s not like they were ever filling arenas on their own. Nonetheless, I was a bit dismayed. State Fair means has-been, and I don’t know if Blues Traveler ever-was. With some bands, like Air Supply, I’ve enjoyed their current circuit, because they come through town often and I’ve been able to see them repeatedly at Indian Casinos and State Fairs.

Air Supply, by the way, is a great show. You wouldn’t think they shred on their repertoire of ballads, but they do.

But my worry is that the current trajectory of Blues Traveler’s career will not lead to them playing smaller and smaller venues. My worry is that the State Fair might be signalling the end is near. It’s the canary in the mine. At least when Eddie Money plays the Fair, people see him out of 1980s nostalgia. With Blues Traveler, it’s the same fans it’s always been, there are just fewer of them.

As for the concert, it was pretty lackluster. The State Fair usually is. The acoustics aren’t great and they’re competing with the sounds of cows and the Zipper and deep-fried vomiting. The band sounded good. They’ve been a remarkably consistent band, with pretty much the same lineup their entire career, except for the guitarist’s younger brother joining when the original bassist died. They play very well together.

I still miss Bobby Sheehan, their orginal bassist, though. They’ve never sounded quite the same. The album that came out after he died, “Bridge,” was one of my favorites, but I feel like they had been sliding before that one and have continued after.

John Popper is one of the most underrated lyricists of the last thirty years:

-Unrequited love? check out “Alone.” “Hopes can always go up, tears can only fall down.”
-Second guessing love? “Girl Inside My Head.” “How hard will it be if she is nice to me?How bad will it get if I let her get to know me? Should she see the willing dog or should I be a jungle cat? And most of all, my god, how does she make her eyes do that?
-One love away from figuring it all out? “Conquer Me.” “Conquer me/Figure me out and set me free… It’s not my impatience, or perhaps just there I lied/ It’s just I’m feeling invincible, and it has me terrified.”
-General melancholy? “Sweet Pain.” “Well all of my heroes up and died/ Songs and a dream are left for me/ What did them in, not suicide/ Just a lengthy friendship and a dream of how it could be”
-Friend just died? “Pretty Angry.” “And i want to shout from my guitar/ Come out come out wherever you are/ The joke is over open up your eyes/ A heart like yours it never dies.”
-Pissed off at the world? “Whoops” is a great song about environmental damage. Get it? We’re destroying the world. “Whoops!”

And you don’t have to be in a bad mood. “Optimistic Thought,” “Just For Me,” “Sweet Talking Hippie.” But seriously, who wants happy songs?

Of course, I had to go off on Popper’s lyrics, because most people only want to talk about his harmonica skills. And yes, the notes he can blow on that mouth harp are paralleled by nobody. The speed with which he blows, holy crap. You’ve never heard “Devil Went Down to Georgia” until you’ve heard John Popper play the solo on harmonica.

But here’s where I’m going to buck the trend. Popper can’t blow like he used to. The speed of the notes is still there, and I’m not saying he plays wrong notes or anything. But there used to be an intensity to his play that is lacking now.

And I think I know what it is. I’m a horrible, horrible person for saying this, but ever since he lost weight, his harmonica playing has dropped a bit. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, mind you. If he hadn’t lost his weight, he’d probably be dead by now, and a John Popper blowing at seventy percent is better than a John Popper blowing at zero percent.

See if you agree. After watching the above link, check this one out. Look at that gut. And then listen to that harmonica.

I just wish that science could build him a prosthetic gut that he could only pull out when he’s on a harmonica solo. Is that too much to ask?

The concert was free with admission to the State Fair, but you can pay extra to get reserved seating. We were about eight rows back, which was great for the first hour of the concert. Then three warmed-over hippies came to the seats right in front of us. The bastards then proceeded to stand up and do the hippie sway/twirl dance for the rest of the fucking concert. Whether the band was playing or not.

Don’t get me wrong, I expect doped up-hippies, completely unaware of their surroundings, at a Blues Traveler concert, and these three were clearly solid Blues Traveler fans since they bought their tickets before I bought mine. But hey, hippies, (no, over here hippies. I’m the one talking. Why are you looking at… never mind, just read this when you’re sober. Like, maybe when you wake up at noon, and… what? Pot is for sale in California now? You know what? Never mind).

Sorry, where was I? Oh yeah. Hey, hippies, if you’re that big of Blues Traveler fans that you physically cannot sit down, even when Chan Kinchla’s re-tuning his guitar, then where the fuck were you for the first hour of the concert? Shit or get off the pot, hippies.

In this case, I’d have preferred you to get off the pot.

Wherin I Explain Why “The Last Jedi” Kicked Ass

A.B. Kelly · December 30, 2017 · Blog Entries, Musings · Last Jedi, Movie Review, movie trilogies, Rian Johnson, Star Wars · One Comment

Okay, y’all are really starting to piss me off.

Not you, of course. I’m sure my ~~readers,~~ ~~reader~~, potential reader is awesome with the correct opinions.

I’m talking to all the rest of you. You idiots that didn’t like The Last Jedi.

Seriously, I had just finished writing a wonderful polemic about my childhood friend, Rian Johnson, and his most recent film, which happened to also be one of the best Star Wars movies of all time. While writing it, I was unaware of a burgeoning counterpoint. Evidently, some people were deluded into thinking it did not deserve the G.O.A.T. (Greatest of all Time) designation.

I heard some initial rumblings over opening weekend. The Rotten Tomatoes fan score was middling around in the low-fifties, but it seemed a lot of those reviews had come in before the movie actually opened, and there were rumors of bots intentionally messing around with the score. Certainly, I knew, when real people took to their respective social media outlets, they’d all love it.

But as first the weekend, and then the following week, went on, there seemed to be a very distinctive backlash against The Last Jedi. The actual size of the backlash might be hard to discern. Two weeks in, I still believe it is a very vocal minority that is being given extra media attention based on how outlandish their cockamamie ideas are.

Recently, one of the yelly-yelly shows on ESPN wondered why people are still paying attention to the Balls, the basketball family whose middle kid dropped out of UCLA because they couldn’t single-handedly break him out of a Chinese prison. I remember thinking, “Who, other than ESPN, is paying attention to the Balls? If you don’t think people should be talking about the Balls, maybe stop leading with them every day.”

But considering the conversation amongst the Baby Boomers at my Christmas dinner table, I guess people are still talking about the Balls. And the Star Wars naysayers have also persisted. So now it’s up to me to defend a movie, and by extension a director, that shouldn’t need defending

The first set of people who seem upset with the movie are the political extremists. The right are pissed that Rose is Asian. The left is angry that Rose isn’t Asian enough. The right hates that General Hux is white. The left is pissed that Poe Dameron is white. The right isn’t sure if they like Kylo Ren as a bad guy, because he’s white but he kind of looks Jewish. If he’s Jewish, they’re okay with him being a bad guy, although they’re not too sure they like it when the maybe-Jew kills the Hitler-ish guy. That’s not how the Alt-Right believes Hitler/Jew stories are supposed to unfold. The left is upset that there are no LGBTQ characters. Holdo is, but it didn’t come up in the movie. Because it would’ve been so much more appropriate for her to grab Billie Lourd’s ass in the midst of the evacuation. Right in front of her dying mother, no less!

And don’t get me started on the force-sensitive little boy at the end. Both sides are whining, “Why did the slave have to be a white male?”

The fact that critics loved the movie pretty much sealed the ire of both sides, as well. Anyone who puts ideology ahead of facts hate the so-called experts who tell them things like the South lost the Civil War or that they should vaccinate their kids.

To both sides, I have a simple enough explanation: go fuck yourselves.

No seriously. Both of you have successfully ruined politics, humor, discourse, general civility, and pretty much everything else in our country. You just couldn’t leave Star Wars alone, could you? And be honest, you didn’t enter the movie with an open mind, did you? You went in looking for things that didn’t fit with your political alignment and proceeded to focus entirely on that. Were you aware that there was a movie with dialogue and a plot going on around all of those casting choices? Probably not.

Here’s something to assuage both sides. Alt-right: It was a long, long time ago, so it’s about as conservative as you can get. Socialists: no planets were destroyed by human action this time.

Now go back into your corners of watching only war movies or Oscar-worthy dramas. And when you’re there, don’t forget to go fuck yourselves.

The other group that dislikes this movie did not approach it with an open mind, either. They are the people who have spent the last two years trolling around on slashfilm and other internet sites espousing their theories about the two great mysteries brought up during The Force Awakens, namely the backgrounds of Rey and Snoke. And if darthmaul-69-420 has based his entire online presence on Snoke being the love child of Palpatine and Yoda, and if he has Jar Jar as Rey’s parents in the office pool, he’s not going to be happy when neither answer is correct.

It’s an odd world we live in. People hate when questions are raised and they hate when those questions are answered. There were all sorts of petitions and calls to boycott The Walking Dead after they ended Season 6 with Negan killing an unknown character. HOW DARE YOU, they screamed, USE A COMMON STORYTELLING DEVICE? Would those people have been happier if the season ended with Abraham lying dead on the ground? Then the people who thought it would be Glenn would’ve been pissed, until Glenn was actually killed, and they would’ve been pissed again. The Walking Dead has been hemorrhaging viewers ever since that fateful decision to add some suspense to their story.

Westworld might have found the sweet spot, but that was helped by the fact that it was a little slow to catch on. It took a few episodes before people realized they were playing with timelines and putting clues and red herrings everywhere. By the time people started going back to re-watch the first few episodes for “clues” (aka the orgy scene), there were only a few episodes left and we had been promised it would be wrapped up by the end of the season. I’ll be curious to see how many people will be pissed off during the second season if it follows a similar pattern. Ten weeks might be a little long of a wait for the big payoff in this watch-an-entire-season-in-an-afternoon world we live in.

If Dallas aired today, “Who Shot JR?” would need to be solved the following week. Hell, if comment threads existed when Empire Strikes Back came out, the Rotten Tomatoes score would be filled with all sorts of “How can we even know if Darth Vader is telling the truth? How dare they bring that up if they’re not going to resolve it?”

Speaking of Empire, you are all aware that The Last Jedi is the second movie of the trilogy, right? Remember all of those questions and mysteries and mythologies of the first Star Wars trilogy? They didn’t really show up until the second movie, and then were resolved pretty early in the third movie. The first movie was a straight-forward, standalone fairy tale. If these people got their wish and Episode VIII started with a flashback of Snoke and Rey in a baby manger together, how satisfying would the next five hours of movie (counting Episode IX) be?

So the question of Rey’s parents was either going to be held over until Episode IX or it was going to be answered the way it was. And it’s very fitting. Anybody can be the hero, you don’t have to come from wonderful Skywalker sperm. Let’s not forget that in the original Star Wars (I know I’m supposed to call it A New Hope, but that was never really a thing until the prequels came out), Luke Skywalker was a nobody. And for ninety percent of Empire Strikes Back, too. Anakin started out that way, too, even if we already knew what he would become.

Speaking of Luke, that’s the other thing people are pissed about. They were hoping that Rey would show up, he’d say “Gosh, even though I have the Force, I had no clue my nephew is a bad guy or that the galaxy is in tatters. I had just retired here for shits and giggles. I guess I’ll come back, no questions asked.” Somehow that would have been more in line with his character?

Or maybe they just wanted Luke to sink an X-Wing into a swamp and mock Rey for not being able to raise it.

There had to be a pretty major reason he had exiled himself. To be true to the hero y’all seem to think he is, the best reason to exile himself would be if he felt he was bad for the galaxy.

Some people are pissed that the Extended Universe was retconned out of existence when Disney bought the rights. Those same people are now pissed that some of the things from that Extended Universe are being brought back into canon. In the Extended Universe, Luke briefly succumbed to the dark side, and he tried and failed to train Han and Leia’s son.

And if you think Luke should’ve been much more perceptive about Kylo Ren’s power or corruption, don’t forget he made a whole bunch of horrible judgments in the first trilogy. “I’m looking for a great warrior,” he said when he first met Yoda.

But whatever. “Not my Luke Skywalker.” Yeah, no shit. Your Luke Skywalker is now 65 years old. He’s Obi-Wan. He’s Yoda. He’s supposed to be a hermit that is not quite sure if the galaxy is ready for thenext generation of Jedis.

Back to Rey, have the people that are so pissed off really thought their theories trough? The two most prominent ones were that she was Luke’s daughter or Obi Wan’s granddaughter (which she may still be). How heroic does that make those deadbeat dads? Conflicted Luke is a bad thing, but Maury Skywalker would be great?

Sure, Anakin abandoned his pregnant wife, but a) Episode III retconned it so he didn’t even know he had done that, and b) he’s Darth fucking Vader.

Do we really want a movie where heroes with subtle mind-control powers are impregnating women and then skipping town? How awesome would that be on the heels of all of the sexual harassment and assault cases coming out of Hollywood and Washington this year? Not your Luke Skywalker? Of course not. He’s Harvey Weinstein’s Luke Skywalker.

I suppose in Obi-Wan’s case, there was the whole “hiding from Darth Vader” thing, but what excuse would Luke have? That he isolated himself on Ahch-To to avoid child support?

Again, I don’t know if the backlash is real. I hope it’s not. Everyone I’ve spoken to loved it. But everyone I’ve spoken to has an IQ and an ability to understand nuance.

A number of theaters have had to post a warning that the ten seconds of silence is intentional. People were complaining that the sound cut out, then cut back in. Really? Because in the theater I saw it in, there were a few gasps, followed by an awe-inspiring, simultaneous holding of two hundred breaths. It was probably the most collectively powerful scene I’ve ever seen in a theater of complete strangers.

I can’t imagine who saw that and thought “Hey, some shit just done blowed up, but there ain’t no big blowsy-upsy sounds. I want my money back.” These same people think that an entire theater’s-worth of speakers can go on the fritz simultaneously and then be fixed within ten seconds.

The simplest answer is that people wanted a predictable Star Wars movie and The Last Jedi was anything but. We’ve been indoctrinated, Empire Strikes Back notwithstanding, that there aren’t supposed to be surprises in Star Wars. The plot is supposed to follow a prescribed narrative. The missions aboard the First Order base of operations aren’t supposed to go sideways. The mercenary is not supposed to stay a mercenary. The bad guys aren’t supposed to realize there are cloaked escape ships. The force is supposed to have a very limited power set. And the hero must only come from an established, Eugenics-based bloodline that would make ~~Hitler~~ Palpatine proud.

People complained that The Force Awakens followed that narrative too closely, then they complained that The Last Jedi strayed from it. Welcome to 2017 America.

Now about that milking scene…

Thank God I’m Not Rian Johnson

A.B. Kelly · December 18, 2017 · Blog Entries, Musings · Brick, Brothers Bloom, Rian Johnson, Star Wars · One Comment

(Note: This is a post primarily about Rian Johnson. To see my thoughts on “The Last Jedi,” click here)

Holy freaking schnickerdoodle. I just saw The Last Jedi. I might be a bit biased, but I think it’s the best Star Wars movie since, I don’t know, ever?

Oh yeah, spoiler alerts and whatnot. But seriously, you get what you deserve if you’re on the 17th page of Google results for Rian Johnson and The Last Jedi.

It’s a long movie, but never feels dragged out. It’s longer than Revenge of the Sith, but feels about half as long. There’s so much going on with it. One review equated it to a combination of “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi.” Yes and no. It certainly answers a number of lingering questions and ends with a sense of optimistic finality that hasn’t wrapped up any Star Wars movie since “Jedi.”

But it didn’t follow the plot of either Episodes V or VI, like The Force Awakens did with Episode IV. Luke’s tutelage on Ahch-To (had to look that one up. I just assumed, in normal Star Wars parlance, it was “The Island Planet”) wasn’t just a rehash of Yoda on Dagobah (The Swamp Planet). The porgs weren’t just updated Ewoks. They didn’t rally together to fight a paleolithic guerilla war against the bad guys.

That one battle that ends most Star Wars movies – you know, the giant battle raging in space while a bunch of the good guys are on board the enemy vessel that’s about to be blown up – turned out to NOT be the culminating scene. The guy we all thought was the new Emperor Palpatine, who would be killed in an orgiastic lightning-fest to end Episode IX, was in fact betrayed and killed during that battle. But it turned out Snoke’s death wasn’t what the movie, or even the trilogy, had been building toward. There were still another 45 minutes in the movie.

And holy shit, how about that “light speed the other way” scene? Has there ever been a silence for that long in any other Star Wars movie? Did John Williams have to be paid extra to NOT write music for that scene?

That “this is not the ending you are looking for” is a classic Rian Johnson tactic. His other movies tend to play along according to form, then the last half-hour pushes the film into another realm, bringing into question all of the assumptions of the trope. The Brothers Bloom, which I think is his best, follows a typical con-man/heist formula. Had it faded to black on the beaches in Mexico, it would have been a standard con-man movie. But then there’s the whole Russia scene, where the target has tracked down the brothers because she had so much fun being conned. When they set up one final con, you’re not entirely sure who is scamming whom. When Adrien Brody realizes Mark Ruffalo actually died, there’s an emotion that isn’t supposed to be experienced in a heist.

Oops. Brothers Bloom spoilers, too. Sorry.

Then again, I might be a little biased when it comes to Rian Johnson. I know the guy. We went to high school together.

The bum still owes me twenty bucks, so his movies better succeed!

Just kidding. He doesn’t owe me any money. In fact, I’m pretty sure I accidentally stole his copy of “Woman of the Year” (1943) on VHS. Rian, sorry if you’ve been looking for a clean copy of “Blitzwolf” all these years.

The rest was all real, though. Rian and I went to high school together. And when I say that, I don’t mean he was some random guy that I knew the name of as we occasionally saw each other around a huge campus. We were in the same history and English classes from pretty much seventh grade on. We hung out outside of class.

When people ask me “Why are you the Wombat?” my go-to response is, “Because Rian was the Llama.”

Rian had a video camera. Shocking, right? We made movies together. Sometimes it was random. I think my first “Rian Johnson Project” was at his birthday party freshman year. I don’t recall the premise, other than we were breaking into a house and I was some sort of James Bond villain that used utensils as weapons. I think. I could be totally off.

But that was what Rian did. If he was with more than one other person, it was, “Hey, let’s make a movie.”

Where we really grew together, and where he started showing his directing chops, was 10th grade English. I don’t know if I would’ve passed Mr. Neidhardt’s class without Rian and his video camera. We had to do a project for every book we read. There were other options besides “make a video,” but those options are lost to time. Probably write a report? Papier mache? Interpretive dance?

Regardless, we did a film project for every book. Each one pushed the scope beyond the previous. It started with little things like adding subtitles. By our third film, we (and by “we,” I often mean Rian, but the rest of us contributed) were splicing together shots to make it look like a raft was going down the freeway and that two people were split seconds away from being hit by a train.

By second semester, we were trying new things. Did you know that when you throw a big Raggedy Ann doll off a cliff and film it from far enough away, it tumbles down just like a human would? And I remember the first time we did a “character disappears from the screen” trick. I said “Danny, you’re no longer needed in this scene,” and waved my stick in front of Danny. We then filmed the same stick movement without Danny, and voila! it looked like I waved my stick and he disappeared.

Amateur stuff, really. But considering we were fifteen years old and digital editing didn’t exist yet, not too shabby.

As I think back now, a lot of our later projects had very little to do with the book. We had built up enough credit with the teacher (a concept I wish more of my students understood), and honestly, I think the teacher was enjoying seeing what we were capable of, as well. Or maybe he had learned his lesson after the one time he said we couldn’t film a video, and then fell asleep during me and Brendan’s debate about whether or not Dungeons and Dragons led to violence.

I knew we should’ve gone with “Where was Alice’s bedroom in the Brady Bunch”?

With another four or five friends that weren’t in that class, we formed a filming group we called the Flat Poodles, after a Weird Al song. We continued to make films throughout junior and senior years. Junior year, Rian, Brendan, and I took an ROP videography class. The teacher was a distant cousin of the NBA player, Jeff Hornacek. I bet that’s not his go-to for “famous person I’ve had encounters with” anymore.

By senior year, I had pretty much hit my ceiling, but Rian was still going strong. He took the ROP class a second time for no credit just to get more experience with editing and the new-fangled (1991 era) computer graphics. By then, the entire school was aware of his talents. I think every rally senior year featured some Rian Johnson video showcasing something around the school. Being on the student’s side back then, it didn’t seem all that momentous. Rian was talented, why wouldn’t his work be featured? Now I’m a teacher, and it occurs to me how out of the ordinary that really was. Everybody at the school knew he was a once-in-a-generation talent.

It wasn’t just his talent behind the camera, though. He writes everything he directs. Movies, at least. I don’t think the “Breaking Bad” people were going to let him write the third-to-last episode. He’s funny and his natural intelligence and empathy comes through in everything he does. That was true back then, too. The rest of us could occasionally help with one or more of those things. I can be funny. Brendan might have gone toe-to-toe in intelligence. Joon and Craig had the whole humanity and empathy things down pat. But Rian was the glue.

An aside: Rian had a hilarious routine for Phil Collins’s “Take Me Home,” where he pretended to be a taxi driver. “So take, take me home.” “Yeah, buddy, you already said that. Where’s your home?” “But I don’t remember.” He timed it perfectly, and the dialogue went on for most of the song. I hoped the taxi driver would show up in one of his movies. Brothers Bloom was probably the best chance. It looks like his next few movies will continue to take place “a long time ago” in a galaxy where Phil Collins doesn’t exist.

But that opening sequence of The Last Jedi, where Poe keeps saying he’ll hold for General Hux was excellent, yesno?

I’ve stolen some of Rian’s ideas, in addition to his VHS tape. I suck at coming up with ideas, as is evidenced that I’m writing this the day after I saw The Last Jedi. Had I thought of it in advance, I could’ve posted this on Friday and gotten all the clickbait. But no, I’ll be posting it after the buzz is gone. Typical. And now that scintillating expose on “Dora the Explorer” that I was thinking of writing this week will be put off till the new year.

Freshman year of college, I took a creative writing class. We had to write a new story every week. While I think my writing is ~~good~~, um, acceptable, I can’t come up with a new fucking idea every fucking week. Seriously, what the hell? And you want me to sign up for your advanced class? You know I’m on the verge of discovering alcohol, right?

Sorry, where was I? Oh yeah, ideas. Whenever I was stuck for a new flash fiction idea (we called them “short stories” back then) that quarter, I would always remember some off-hand Rian comment. “I thought it would be cool to write a story from the perspective of an ant being washed down the drain in a sink.” Or “A guy is trying to get up the courage to talk to a girl and finally gives up, will maybe try again tomorrow, even though they’re the only survivors of a nuclear holocaust.” I think I stole both of those. Probably sucked horrendously at both. But add a creative writing class at U.C. Davis to the list of classes I would have failed without Rian.

Rian’s first movie, Brick, was filmed at our high school. If you look close enough, you can see the house I grew up in on the hill behind the school. I think he already had the idea for Brick, or the beginnings of it, in high school. Senior year, he had an idea for a movie about a high school student who saw through the mirage and knew the dark dealings going on beneath the shadows. We didn’t get much into it, only filmed two scenes, but the tone seemed very familiar thirteen years later.

The role of the high-school student, later “stolen” by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, was originally played by yours truly. The part moptop, part mullet, mess of a hairdo that JGL sported in the movie was exactly what I looked like in 1992. I’m not saying I was the inspiration (yes, I am), but I definitely know that Rian equated my hairstyle to a specific type of character.

And let me go one further. Rian as a director wouldn’t exist without me. I was the first headache-of-an-actor that he ever had to “direct around.” Not in the prima donna, demanding my own dressing room, type of way. But in the “I’m a horrible actor” kind of way. Think Nicholas Cage playing Austin Powers. Over the top and punctuating every joke to death. After me, Bruce Willis must’ve been a breath of fresh air.

The last time I saw Rian was at the San Francisco opening for Brothers Bloom. Back then, he was still small time and had to/got to follow his movie around to each of its openings. I told him he needed to stop killing off all of his characters. Hollywood survives on sequels. I thought maybe he was going to become the directorial version of Leonardo di Caprio, who I believe has never acted the same role twice. It turns out Rian was just waiting for the RIGHT sequels to come along.

Although he still (spoiler alert) has the tendency to kill off main characters.

It was great seeing Rian at the Brothers Bloom premiere. Someone asked him how he got into filming, and he talked about \he and his friends grabbing the camera and running off into the canyon to, I don’t know, see what it looked like when we throw a Raggedy Andy off a cliff. I thought he was throwing out that anecdote because he knew I was in the audience. Nope. That’s just who he is.

If you see any interviews with Rian, be assured that his unassuming humility is real. Remember that the next time you think only assholes succeed. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit A FUCKING STAR WARS MOVIE AND ANOTHER TRILOGY TO COME.

My Facebook feed has been filled with well wishers this week. Most of them were tongue in cheek, “going to see a friend’s art project.” I haven’t seen a sour grape amongst them. Rian’s a guy you can’t root against. The entire SCHS Class of ’92 feels a huge bit of pride, and a small bit of ownership, for him. We referred to him as “Rian, Freaking, Johnson!” long before the rest of the world knew he deserved such a moniker.

Did we know he had a Star Wars in his future? Hell, no. It was the early 1990s and as far as we knew, Star Wars was over. The Timothy Zahn trilogy that started the Expanded Universe was just hitting the bookstores. At the time, Rian wanted to work on “Twin Peaks.” Hey, “Twin Peaks” is back, too.

But David Lynch, I knew Rian Johnson. Rian Johnson was a friend of mine. And you, David Lynch, are no Rian Johnson.

George Lucas, I’m looking at you, too.

I still sometimes show one of those 10th grade projects to my current students. It was ostensibly about “Johnny Got His Gun,” but we basically used the book as an excuse to make a “commies vs. good guys” war pic. Because Dalton Trumbo was a communist. Like I said, our teacher gave us some leeway by the end of the year. Did I mention the camera was broken for one project so we just spliced together scenes from “Three Amigos” and did voiceovers?

I show the film to my students, at least in theory, because it shows what we thought of the commies in the 1980s. Cold War propaganda and whatnot. My character’s first line is “It is good zat ve attack zem from behind, because if ve fight fair, ve are so weak.” Then we both laugh, exaggerated and simultaneous. “Hah. Hah. Hah.” Now re-read that dialogue in the style of Nicholas-Cage-as-Austin-Powers.

But the real reason I show it is to give my students a glimpse of me at their age. And, as a postscript, “Oh, that other guy? Yeah, he wrote and directed <Insert most recent Rian Johnson project here>.” This year, I added, “Here’s a YouTube clip of him on Jimmy Kimmel last week.”

This year, all three of my classes, after seeing the two of us on the same screen together and what Rian is today, asked if I was pissed.

“Why in the world would I be pissed? One of my friends is awesome!”

“Because that could’ve been you.”

“No. It really couldn’t have been.”

Even if I was an accomplished writer, I wouldn’t touch Star Wars with a ten-foot pole.

That’s how my students are, though. I don’t know if it’s an age thing (Teenagers!) or a generational thing (Millenials!) or a culture thing (Low SES!), but most of my students think another’s success is at the expense of theirs. When one of them catches a touchdown, the rest of his team is pissed that it wasn’t them.

Hopefully it’s just a teenage thing and they’ll grow out of it. I hope they get to feel the pride that comes when the most talented person you know is acknowledged for that talent. I’m sure I wasn’t as nervous as Rian was when the movie was about to start, but I probably attacked the reviews more voraciously. Oh please, oh please, oh please, I thought, let it be the best goddamned Star Wars movie ever.

And it was.

After the movie, I mentioned to my wife that, had I been Rian Johnson, after Carrie Fischer’s unfortunate death, I might have gone back in and switched who was flying the ship that went to light speed and cut the First Order ships in half. It would’ve been a fitting sacrifice for a character that we know won’t make it to Episode IX.

I also don’t think I would’ve turned Benicio del Toro. I had visions of him as the next Han Solo.

My wife’s response?

“Thank God you’re not Rian Johnson.”

Juan Valdez was a Hack

A.B. Kelly · December 13, 2017 · Blog Entries, Musings · alcohol, beer, caffeine, coffee, drinking, food & drink, wine · 2 Comments

I’ve been a wine snob for almost as long as I’ve been drinking alcohol.

I come by it naturally, living in Northern California. There are probably more than 200 wineries within a couple hours’ drive. In my early twenties, even most of the wineries in Napa were free or had a very small tasting fee that went toward the purchase of wine. Until five years ago, Sonoma County was almost entirely free, and even today, most of the wineries in Amador County are free. Amador is closer to my house and even if they’re ignored by the greater zeitgeist, I will put their wines in the Pepsi Challenge against Napa Valley any day of the week.

At these wineries, you can do side-by-side tastings of different varietals. Sometimes you can taste the same varietals from different years. You learn what you like and don’t like pretty quickly. Or, if not, you at least get a decent buzz.

If you pay a little extra (or join the club), you can taste the good shit. The reserves at some wineries aren’t much different than their standard swill, but at other places, there’s a marked difference. Sometimes a run-of-the-mill winery, or a mass producer that you wouldn’t expect to have anything special, like Gallo or Beringer, make some pretty decent $40 wines.

Who knows, maybe Charles Shaw even makes a Twenty Buck Chuck.

In addition to a geographical inclination toward wine snobbery, I spent a good portion of my twenties waiting tables in a nice restaurant. There I learned the difference between truly upper-end wines and the rest. Just as I will put Amador against Napa, there are a ton of excellent substitutes for the Opus Ones and Silver Oaks of the world. I can’t tell you how often I encouraged a customer who wanted something like Silver Oak to try Rodney Strong Symmetry. They loved the change and the $20 they saved was usually redirected to my tip.

But don’t ever suggest any replacement for somebody that wants Opus One. They’ll be none too happy, and it won’t help your tip. I’ve personally never tried Opus One. A lot of people will give their curious server a swig of their specialty wine. One time, when a customer brought in wine from 1974 and I told him that was the year I was born, he refused to let me leave until I had a drink. It was very smooth. Like, almost water smooth. If he had kept it in his cellar another year, it might’ve been water.

But nobody ever lets their server take a sip of Opus One. So I can only assume it tastes like shit. Bitter, sour-grapes, shit.

The biggest secret weapon in my arsenal for anybody that was undecided was Treana Red, a tiny imprint of a small winery in the totally unknown wine region (unless you’ve seen “Sideways”) of Paso Robles. You wouldn’t expect Treana to be good. It calls itself a “red blend,” which brings to mind the horrors of Carlo Rossi jugs and Franzia boxes. But to say no customer complained after I suggested it doesn’t go far enough. Every customer I ever suggested it to thanked me and wondered how such an excellent wine could be so reasonably priced and unknown.

Seriously, go find a bottle of Treana Red. You can probably order one for less than $40 if your state doesn’t suck. Tell ’em The Wombat sent ya. They won’t know what the fuck that means, but it’ll be funny.

While my destiny as cork dork was determined by location, my evolution into a beer snob took an alternate route. For the latter part of my single years, I was a Happy Hour Hound. Needing to be sober and somewhat white-eyed, not to mention ready to teach, by 7:00 in the morning, if I decided to get blotto on a particular evening, or every particular evening, it had to be before 7:00 PM. And the best, cheapest way to get to that particular nirvana is to drink whatever swill is coming out of the middle tap. Did I know about microbrews and IBUs and ABV? Sure. If I drank a beer out at dinner, it would’ve been a Fat Tire or a Sierra Nevada or a Sam Adams. If I was grabbing a six-pack on the way home, it would follow a similar pattern.

But if I was sitting at a bar trying to get drunk, then it’s “Pass the Bud Light.”

There was a point in time I could distinguish between Bud Light, Miller Lite, and Coors Light. I was doing a “blind taste test” put on by the Miller Lite girls at a baseball game. I knew which was which right away, so I picked their brand to get better swag. She didn’t believe me. We tried it again. I was right again. She was still skeptical. Whatever, lady, just give me my light-up beads.

When I moved in with my wife, my commute extended to fifty miles. I need to be awake by 5:00 to be out of the house by 5:45. That doesn’t leave a lot of hangover time. I also have a child. The number of beers I drink on a typical day, week, or month seems infinitesimal compared to a decade ago. Drinking alcohol on a weeknight is a rarity. As a result, on those Fridays and Saturdays where I feel like imbibing, my tolerance is virtually non-existent. Two beers, sixteen hours after I woke up, and I can’t even make it through my one half-hour of grown-up television.

Oh well, at least that episode of Dora the Explorer was especially scintillating.

A six-pack in the fridge will now last me a few weeks, not halfway through a Friday night. And if I’m only having one or two beers, I ain’t wasting them on shit.

It was a casual process, but I remember a moment last year when I met a friend for happy hour before going to a baseball game. I was three good beers in when I got to the game, which happened to be celebrating that most ubiquitous of all minor league promotions, Thirsty Thursday. I figured since I was already three beers in, I could probably switch to shit beer. After all, even Jesus said to drink the good wine before the crappy wine, then you won’t notice it as much.

Maybe wine, Jesus, but not beer. Holy crap, that was the most horrible thing I ever drank. Then I did the unthinkable: I paid for a $9 Sierra Nevada instead of the $1 Bud Light. The 30-year old inside me cringed.

But I make more money and drink less beer than the 30-year old me. So it’s quality over quantity now.

Then again, I’m not the best example of a beer snob, because I don’t like any of the hipster beer movements sweeping every microbrewery in town. Or the fact that every town has a microbrewery now. But that’s probably a story for another time.

What I’m here to talk about today is a third bit of liquid snobbery that I didn’t even know was possible, much less that it applied to me, until recently.

My name is the Wombat. And I am a coffee snob.

Did you know that there are still people in the world that drink Yuban?

Hoo-boy, there are some crappy coffees out there. I guess I kind of knew they were out there. The coffee aisle at the grocery store is full of them. In fact, now that I mention it, the part of the coffee aisle that I actually shop from is a small portion at the very end. I assumed the rest of the aisle was taken up by, I don’t know, tea and powdered creamer. Maybe filters. But I’ve seen an awful lot of Sanka in my peripheral vision en route to the cereal.

The coffee snob started innocently enough. There’s a hipster in my department who brought in a tea kettle and a pour over kit. We have a fifteen-minute brunch between first and second period, during which we can heat enough water for two people to have a freshly-crafted brew. A couple others can brew theirs during their prep period right before or after, and the pour over spot became the modern-day equivalent of ye olde water cooler. Could we have gone standard coffee maker? Sure, but then we’d come in, pour our cup, and lose the sense of community that comes with the slow, agonizing second-half of the pour over process. Seriously, I bet an opium-molasses hybrid would strain faster than the last few drops going through the waterlogged grounds.

Hold on for a moment while I go patent Opium Molasses.

Unofficially, the “Pour Over Club” brings coffee whenever we’re running low, but it’s pure communism once the goods have been procured. Somebody might be milking the process, but as a general rule, we all need the caffeine enough that we’ll make sure there’s enough coffee. One day, nobody remembered that we ran out the day before and we had to go without. The next day, our prep area looked like this:

coffee

This is when I started to realize I was a bit of a snob. Somebody brought in Lavazza. Sounded interesting. Italian name, so it MUST be good. Turns out I wasn’t much of a fan. I figured it was just a taste thing, like an IPA, which I don’t care for but I know many beer enthusiasts love. Still, I struggled through it, because it was the only thing present and even the ugliest hooker in the whorehouse can service some needs.

Six months later, I accidentally brought some more Lavazza in. It was on sale, and I thought, “Italian name, so it MUST be good.” Maybe a little more caffeine would’ve helped me remember. The next day, two of my co-workers had brought in replacements. Turns out I wasn’t the only one that thought it was subpar. It’s not terrible, just not that great. So we kept it as a backup for the next time we ran out. It lasted most of the semester.

But one day I came in, to my horror, to discover a giant vat of Folgers waiting for me. I thought it was a joke. “Who the fuck brought Folgers?” I demanded of everybody in my department. A few of my fellow teachers don’t really drink coffee, and when they do, they sully it with flavored creamer. I started my accusations there. They all denied it. I went in backward order of who I assumed to be the most kindred coffee spirit. By the time I made it to the other snob, I thought for sure someone had lied. Except the final interogatee admitted that yes, he was the culprit. It was leftover from some function he had gone to over the weekend. One of those get-togethers where they have a huge urn full of drudge. His wife asked if we might use it at work and it was either that or throw it out. He figured, “why not?”

I thought my derision would indicate “why not,” but that wasn’t even the biggest factor. A few days later, he brewed it once to prove a point. Even the non-regulars, with their Irish Creme creamer, took a few sips and opted out. The entire thirty-ounce tub sat patiently at the back of the area until the end of the year before we dumped it. There had been a day or two with no coffee available, yet we still didn’t bust into the red vat of mediocrity. Better to go dry for the day. The headache I have on the way home will remind me to stop off and buy some more coffee.

Incidentally, after we mocked the creamer-user enough, he tried some of our coffee black. It wasn’t the bitter crap he had assumed it to be. A week or two later, he admitted that he was now drinking black coffee at home. And now that he was drinking it black, he couldn’t do the Maxwell House. But the good news was that the money being saved on creamer could go toward buying better coffee.

It’s amazing how, once you actually start tasting the coffee, you want coffee with taste. A good portion of the industry hopes you never discover that coffee can taste good.

Fortunately for me, my snobbery seems to be coming at a perfect time. There’s been a resurgence (or maybe just a surgence) of good coffee shops of late. I wouldn’t have believed it five years ago, when the common narrative was that Starbucks pushing everyone out of business. As much as I love me some gingerbread latte, Starbucks isn’t a coffee business. At best, it’s an espresso business, although with all of the specialty Frappuccinos coming out, even that moniker is faltering. Notice how few of the mermaids, dragons, and Christmas trees have coffee as their base flavor? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve ordered the coffee frappuccino and had to send it back when they gave me a caramel one. “Oh sorry, we’re not used to people ordering coffee flavor.”

I’ve settled on ordering an espresso Frappuccino. They’ll give me an off look, but at least the order will be right. Or better yet, I’ll just get a Javiva at Peet’s.

But I feel like the “as sweet as possible” trend is reversing. Competitors are returning to what we now call “drip coffee,” aka coffee. The mom and pop shops have been replaced with hipster locales where they don’t crinkle their nose after I say “no cream or sugar.” Single origin, French press, Clover, and the pour over are becoming increasingly common. And don’t get me started on the wonderful things they are all doing with cold brew.

My favorite spot in this new trend is Philz Coffee in the Bay Area. Their motto is “One Cup at a Time,” and every single coffee they serve is a pour over. They have about fifteen varietals, each with tasting notes, and you can even blend more than one varietal into a single cup of coffee. After you order it, they grind the beans and “brew it” right there in front of you. When it is handed to you, there is a layer of bubbles on the top, and if you slap that lid on before you have slurped up some of those bubbles, the barista might have a nervous breakdown. How cool is that? They want you to sample the cup of coffee like it’s a bottle of wine. The entryway to snobbery is open and widening.

Unlike beer, where my preferences are very specific, I’m not particular about the coffee varietals. Dark roast, medium roast, light roast. All are fine, especially if the brewer knows that dark roast need not be the consistency of crude oil. Guatemalan? Honduran? Kona Blend and all of its attendant controversies? Sure.

Even decaf.

I’m just kidding. Decaf is a demon-spawn cocktail filtered through the devil’s own anus. Non-alcoholic beer is bad enough, but I can at least get my head around people who want to avoid alcohol. There is no reason on the planet that someone should opt to avoid the wonder that is caffeine.

And I’m not going to lie and say that I can actually taste all of those “notes of” that the descriptors say. Wine? Yeah, I can definitely sense the grapefruit in a sauvignon blanc. With zinfandel, I know I prefer a peppery one over a jammy one. But when the coffee says it tastes of hazelnut and cardamom, I’m just going to have to trust them. Even the very basic flavors or “fruity” or “nutty” doesn’t come through on my palate. I’m skeptical it’s on anybody’s. I wonder what temperature it needs to be at to get that flavor.

Whoever heard of “fruity coffee,” anyway?

But that’s okay. I’ve come to discover that there is only one flavor profile I need my coffee to have. It’s a flavor that might be a rarity in the coffee world but, thankfully, is becoming easier to find.

That flavor is: good.

4tw FTW

A.B. Kelly · December 5, 2017 · Blog Entries, Musings · 4thewords, NaNoWriMo, writing, writing advice · One Comment

I’m currently kicking the ass of an evil marionette brought to life by a wicked witch. In typical RPG fashion, I already beat the shit out of the witch. Actually, the witch was a “global event,” so all the MMORPG players contributed to beat the boss monster. But now that I’ve finished this level, I’m bumping around to finish some side quests and level up. If I can beat this marionette two more times, I get some tickets that I can use to buy sparkly items for my character. Fun times.

Based on my current count, I will have killed the fucker by the end of this sentence.

Yeah, you’re dead. Eat shit and die, Ceratonia.

Of course, now I’m no longer fighting Ceratonia. I wouldn’t have wanted to waste that last sentence. I’m now fighting Wiwaz, an even “stronger” marionette. And the first salvo in our battle were the sentences “Yeah, you’re dead. Eat shit and die, Ceratonia.”

Dammit. I should have written “you are dead,” not “you’re dead.” Because the way to defeat these particular Dark Lord spawns is to write words.

I found a new writing website just in time for NaNoWriMo this year. I also won NaNoWriMo for the first time this year. Causation or correlation? I’m leaning toward the former.

4thewords.com is an RPG-style website. But each of the monsters require a certain number of words written in a certain amount of time to be defeated. Some of them are easy, 300 words in forty minutes. Others, like the Wiwaz I’m fighting right now, max out at the NaNo-inspired 1,667 words in 24 hours.

So maybe I should’ve told Ceratonia that he should dine heartily on a plethora of his own fecal matter. Oh, and die.

After a few fights, you can get better weapons and armor, so in my current battle, I actually have about 26 hours and only have to write about 1400 words. Easy as pie. A very, cherry, strawberry, boysenberry, and a zillion other kinds of berry pie. Shall I describe the scrumptious crust?

I can’t say enough about how this website has transformed my approach to NaNoWriMo, and to writing in general. That 300 word monster? He’s the first one you fight. I always knew I could write 300 words if I was ready to go at the start. The forty minutes was a little daunting, but I made sure I was free of distraction and got it done.

The next monster I encountered required 500 words in two hours. Not surprisingly, the 300 words I had written against the first guy didn’t really get the scene I was planning down on paper. Of course not. Three hundred words barely gives you enough room to describe a bowel movement, much less how a wooden puppet is going to dine upon it.

And yet, in the first forty-three years of my writing life, there have been many days that I couldn’t even get 300 words on a piece of paper. And then I’d go a week without writing 300 words. Then a month. Then when I’d finally sit down and write 300 words, I’d get pissed that I had finally found time to write and I didn’t even get to that point of the scene that had been playing around in my mind for two months. Then it’s rinse and repeat, and a year later, I’d be a thousand words farther into the same damned chapter I was in a year ago and pissed as hell that I couldn’t get anywhere with this particular project.

But now? If I don’t finish my train of thought with one monster, I’ll just gauge whether I want to take on the next one now or tomorrow. Depending on what part of the dungeon you’re in, you can usually choose who to fight next. If I feel like writing 800 words over the next three hours, I can. Or if I want to take a more leisurely approach, I can got 1000 or 1200 over an 8- or 10-hour span. As a result, I’ve actually become pretty good at knowing how many words I need to get through a certain scene.

Now, in contrast with those days of struggling to writing 300 words down, I know I can do 500 words almost as an afterthought.

You get bonuses for maintaining a writing streak. You need to write 444 words to get credit, and no weapons or armor make that number easier to reach. That’s one reason I’m still writing into December. You put fake digital badges on the line, and I become obsessive. I lost twenty pounds the first month after I got a Fitbit, and was at fifty after a year.

And obviously, the website doesn’t distinguish between writing a book or a blog entry. I actually wrote a few things I needed for work on 4thewords. Cheating? Maybe, but the work shit had to be done and that’s the type of thing that would normally derail me from writing, whether it’s NaNoWriMo or any of the other eleven months of the year. And finishing that boring work report is a hell of a lot more fun if I’m shoving a metaphorical sword up a puppet’s apocryphal ass.

It should be noted the website doesn’t actually show the deaths of the monsters and any references to scatalogical functions are entirely my own. 4thewords.com disavows any and all unsightly references being made in their honor.

One other way that 4TW (as the cool kids are calling it) helps my particular brand of writing is that it counts all words, not just the final product. If I rewrite a sentence three times, I get credit for each of the words in each rewrite. One would think that would hurt NaNoWriMo. “Hooray, I’ve written two thousand words! Oh shit, it only counts as five hundred.”

But that doesn’t happen. For one thing, I don’t rewrite as often as I think I do. If I write 1000 words, the actual amount is usually in the low 900s. Sure, a particularly bad batch might only net me 850, but guess what? That 850 might not have been written in the classic NaNoWriMo. They tell you to turn off your inner editor, but I’m sorry, sometimes I know that what I just wrote makes no sense, and I like being rewarded for looking at it a second time. That doesn’t mean I’m going to agonize over every morsel. This isn’t editing.

But the NaNo mantra is ever onward. Each precious word is your child, and you’re not just going to go back and erase your child. If you EVER erase a baby, you will NEVER get to 50,000 babies!

But the way that plays out in my writing style is this: I’m not sure how to word the next sentence in the best way, so I don’t write it. I stare at the screen. I go grab a drink. I play a round of Candy Crush. Or a round of golf. Or I re-shingle the roof. Anything to avoid putting a sentence down that might need to be erased.

4TW works the opposite. When I get to that sentence, I’ll just write it. And as soon as it’s on the page, I can look at it, think it through, and go change those three words to three better words and, voila, I’m six words closer to defecating on a witch. (Not in the “Fifty Shades of Grey” kind of way.)

As such, I am amending a statement I made a couple of NaNo’s ago. It’s my most-read blog post, presumably because most of the participants of NaNo are trying to avoid “doing the NaNo,” so they google things to read about NaNo. I will insert a link later, but for the purpose of words on paper, right now, I will just describe the inserting of links later.

My original statement was that one thousand words a day was, under normal circumstances, an upper limit for me. 4thewords showed me that I can blow past that. Even if I’m not sure what I am going to write, I can at least bumble around enough to get words on paper. They might not be good words, but they’re there. Before 4TW, when the goal was just an amorphous 1667 words in a day, or even worse, “write something today,” a thousand words seemed some sort of natural upper limit before I needed an overnight to replenish my idea bank. Now I’m like, 800 words over 10 hours? Shit, I can go see Thor in between and still have hours to spare.

Most of the time, when I have a specific plan for then next 1,000 words, it’ll actually take me closer to 3,000 words to get through it. And the vague idea I have for what will come after that probably covers another five to ten thousand. It used to frustrate me that I’d write and get no closer to the next scene. Now I embrace it. Words on paper are the goal for today, not finishing the scene.

Of course, one thing I’ve noticed about both 4TW and NaNo are that they make you a bad writer. Usually the fewer words you write, the better. But, as I joked earlier, it’s easy enough to turn a five-word sentence into ten words. That doesn’t make it better and often makes it worse. It tends toward the passive voice. NaNo only does it implicitly. In fact, they explicitly say 50,000 words is an entire novel. Not any novel I’ve ever seen, other than “Slaughterhouse Five.” So it goes. So at least in theory, NaNo’s 50,000 words should not be wasting any space. Yeah, right.

The NaNo people say that you’ll probably add 10,000 words in the rewriting/editing phase, making it closer to “Lord of the Flies” territory. Um, no. Am I the only one that actually takes words out when I’m editing? The first time I attempted a 1,500-word flash fiction, it was close to 4,000 before I took the butcher’s knife to it. The book I worked on through November is at 70,000 words. (When I say I won NaNo, I actually cheated a little. There were already 20,000 words written. But I still did the 50,000 in a month, so screw you, it counts.) The book isn’t done yet. Based on where I am in the story, it’ll easily make it past 110,000 words. Then I’ll edit 25,000 of them out.

4TW actually exacerbates that problem by making the “add some frivolous words” a bit more explicit. If I’m nearing the end of a scene and still have 150 words to defeat this particular monster, I’m not going to spend the time making a new file, am I? Hell, no. So let me just make a wordier description. I’ll have my main character scratch his chin and think about the predicament he’s in, think through his potential choices and the logical ramifications of taking each of those choices. Ten words left? Fine, he scratches his ass, too.

That doesn’t make good story telling, but that works wonders for both NaNo and 4TW. Hence the reason I’m going to have to chop at least 10,000 words off of my novel once it’s finished.

The good news is that, for the first time since I wrote those first 20,000 words in 2014, I feel like “once my novel is finished” might actually happen. And I have 4TW to thank for that feeling. If you’re interested, look me up – my character’s name is Wombat. I also have a referral code. If you want me to let them know I recruited you, leave me a comment.

For now, I’ve got 800 words left to write in my current battle, and it might be worthwhile to put some of those in the actual novel. To quote the Blues Brothers, it’s 800 words to defeat Tamarix, I’ve got a full blog post, a half a book, it’s dark, and I’m wearing sunglasses.

Hit it!

Taking the Oregon Trail to My Bowels

A.B. Kelly · June 18, 2017 · Blog Entries · child rearing, dysentery, health, sickness, vomiting · No Comments

My daughter gave me dysentery for Father’s Day. I guess ash trays are gauche these days, and ties are SO bourgeois.

Okay, it might not have been dysentery. It might have just been the flu. But somewhere around 8:00 last night, I was pretty sure this little Oregon Trail of life wasn’t quite making it through to Willamette.

Baby brought it home from day care, throwing up throughout the night on Thursday. Poor thing. I really sympathized with her. Sympathy, from the Greek word for “to suffer.” Even stayed home with her all day Friday.

Baby was mostly clear by Friday afternoon. Yay! We’re in the clear!

But that clearly wasn’t enough for the gods of tragedy. They had to pass it along to me and my wife with an Oedipal fury. Not Oedipal as in sleeping with our parents. More along the “gouging our eyes out” variety.

Wife and I actually caught the symptoms within an hour of each other on Saturday. Thank God for grandparents nearby. If you don’t have any of those, I suggest you grow some.

Then it was just wife and I dealing with the rigors of keeping things down. We failed miserably. It seemed like we were aligned perfectly, each bout of “Out of Both Ends” starting within minutes of each other. Thank God for multiple bathrooms.

There are a few things I’ve never quite understood about the human propensity to purge the system during sickness. I know that we occasionally have to get something harmful out of our system. I have dogs and cats, and they both vomit. But dogs and cats just vomit once and then they’re done. No histrionics, no curling up by the commode waiting for the next round. Never once seen my 17-year old cat (who vomits often) dry heave. Never seen Hershey squirts flying out of his ass.

As an evolutionary trait, how did humans come up with this particular purging mechanism? How did we survive as a species? Because I think any wolf or bear in a five-mile radius would’ve heard and smelled me last night. Any other tribe members would have done their best to steer wide from me. Leave me with a little tombstone that said “Here lies Wombat. He done shat himself to death.”

During the second half of the last night’s plague outbreak, I grew tired of dry heaving and cotton mouth and feebly stated “I’d rather be vomiting up something instead of nothing.” A statement I would not agree with an hour later, but at the time it seemed logical.

I’ve always been a fan of water. It seems an odd statement, but I know a lot of people who aren’t. Think of how many products are out there to make water more palatable. But I love the stuff. On the average day, I only drink three types of fluid – water, coffee (black), and iced tea (unsweetened). Because when I drink, I want fluid, not sugar. I’ll save my sugar intake for ice cream. Or beer (drink number four on the “non-average” days).

And that first gulp of water I had last night was exquisite. My mouth was so parched. I wanted to drink a gallon of it. I downed the first pint in one gulp. Maybe not the best idea, but it was soothing every square centimeter of my mouth, tongue, and throat. I tried to pace myself. I swished some of the second pint in my mouth instead of swallowing, then fill a third pint and put it by my bed as I tried to pass out for another hour.

And then it all came back up. More violent than before. As if my body was shaming me for attempting to, I don’t know, hydrate? Survive? Seriously, body, what the fuck is your problem?

And this is, again, when I start to question the purpose of vomiting, and especially of repeat vomiting. The symptoms when we are sick are not actually from the virus or bacteria itself, but from our body’s attempt to attack and remove those foreign agents. The flu doesn’t cause you to vomit, your body attacking the flu causes you to vomit. As a lifelong allergy sufferer, I know that no amount of logic and reason will stop my body from thinking dust is a mortal enemy.

So the first round of vomits is understandable, removing a bit of poison. Your stomach doesn’t like the last thing you ate, so get in there and remove it. And if I put something potentially damaging in afterward, it’s probably a good idea to be on guard. My body really doesn’t have the fucking time to process shit right now, what with the fighting off Montezuma’s goddamn Revenge, and all.

But water? If I had put some Crystal Light in it, I could understand. My wife tried some Sprite and on an earlier respite, I had a little ginger ale. Our bad. I deserve that sickeningly-sweet upchuck and the burned nasal hairs that come with it.

But it was just basic water. What the fuck kind of overzealous white blood cell is deciding that the building block of all life is somehow detrimental to my wellbeing? And has this little fuckwad checked in with my mouth recently? Because my mouth is definitely on board the whole “water is good” train.

I seriously question how humans are still around. How did we even get to the point where ol’ Jebediah could set out from Independence, MO, in the hopes of maybe only catching cholera this time.

Good news is I’ll have plenty of time to think about it. I feel another flux coming on.

Twinkle, Twinkle, Embryonic Gas Giant

A.B. Kelly · May 18, 2017 · Blog Entries, Musings · adult interpretation, child rearing, children's songs, growing up · No Comments

My musical appetite has been changing.

Well, not my appetite, so much, as my ingestion. Because while I would still prefer a prime cut of Beatle with a scant Traveler de Bleu aperitif topped off by a Bosstone nightcap, I have a toddler. Meaning that my music consumption has become the symphonic equivalent of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese/Mayonnaise Casserole.

Children’s songs haven’t changed much since I was a kid, or since my mother was a kid, or since Thomas Jefferson was a kid. Seriously. Jimmy Crack Corn and Eenie-Meenie-Minie-Moe are slave songs.

And the goddamned bough continues to break and the fucking dead baby falls out of the tree. Now sleep tight, sweetpea.

But while the song remains the same (C’mon, two-year old, gimme some Zeppelin), I approach them from a different vantage point. I notice different things about them. Because when I was a child, I never stopped to ask what the fuck the baby was doing up in the tree.

Things like: How was I forty years old before I realized “ABC” and “Twinkle, Twinkle” are the same melody? I know that, before the Beatles, there were only three chords, but weren’t there more melodies?

And I’m not talking about unintended references. For instance, the Poli Sci major in me thinks of Non-Governmental Organizations in the third verse on B-I-N-G-O, but I know that wasn’t the intent of the song.

And if I snicker every time I hear “The prettiest hole that you ever did see,” that’s on me. It’s clearly not what the song is about.

And don’t even get me started on “She’ll be coming ’round the mountain when she comes.”

But there are many children’s songs that do sound different as an adult.

To wit:

Baa, Baa, Black Sheep

First of all, it’s the same song as “ABC” and “Twinkle, Twinkle.” Good thing it predates copyright.

It’s a song about feudalism. The local lord, or maybe a census-taker, is coming around to inquire about his manorial duties. “Yes, sir, yes, sir, three bags full.” Because, y’know, if he didn’t do my full three bags, it’s off with his head.

But what happened to the poor peasant’s wool?

The first one went to the local lord in taxes. So one might think this is some conservative diatribe against excessive taxation and the welfare state. Even the Beatles have been known to write a ditty questioning an exorbitant tax structure, a point lost on my daughter when I tried to subtly replace her Fischer Price CD with “Revolver.”

But the poor peasant would love to be saddled with a mere 33% tax rate. You see, after he gives one bag to the Master, he must also give one to the Dame, which is the Catholic Church. Wow, even the Mormons only take ten percent. It must’ve been nice to be the only church in town… or country… or continent.

So where does the last bag of wool go? To the little boy who lives down the lane. Because that’s how feudalism works. No ownership allowed. And your work is divvied up for the whole manor.

But seriously peasant, quit your whining. You know you’re getting wheat from the little boy’s family. And I bet their wheat’s up to snuff, not this black wool shit that you’re trying to pass off as legit.

Just be thankful it’s not a market economy or your ass would be out on the streets.

Speaking of market economy….

Mockingbird

That might not be the actual name of the song, but y’all know which one I mean, right? The one the starts out: “Hush little baby, don’t have a cow, Daddy’s gonna buy your affection now.”

Compensating much?

Every verse is “I’ll buy you something, and if it doesn’t work, I’ll buy you something else.” Sponsored by Target.

Hey, here’s a thought. Maybe try engaging your child instead of instilling the bourgeois mentality of consumerism in her.

And the father ends it with the ultimate statement: “If that horse and cart fall down, you’ll still be the prettiest girl in town.”

Aww, what a pretty sentiment. After I’m such a huge disappointment as a father, at least you’ll still have your looks to fall back on.

Can we say future stripper?

Speaking of which: We’ll all go out to meet her when she comes? Ouch. I’ve heard of the Walk of Shame, but this seems excessive. Is this a royalty thing, where the nobles would applaud the new king and queen on their wedding night?

Sorry. Back to the children’s tunes:

Mary had a Little Lamb

I get that the lamb has some rather serious separation anxiety. If this were a psychologist blog, maybe we’d go into the root causes of bovine angst.

But this is a teacher’s blog. So I choose to focus when the lamb follows here to school, “which was against the rules.” I’ve worked in a number of schools over the past twenty years, and while I can’t necessarily quote every rule verbatim, I don’t know that I have ever come across a Lamb-specific rule.

Now, maybe it’s a general animal rule. But I feel the implication is that only a lamb would make the children laugh and play. A non-lamb would be far less disruptive to the educational environment. Aren’t cats and dogs brought in for show-and-tell?

Clearly this school had a lamb-specific rule, and I wonder what necessitated that. Was a school board member speciest? Had other lambs followed other children to school in the past?

More importantly, from a twenty-first century educatrat perspective, was the rule properly enunciated ahead of time? Possibly in the student handbook or on the school’s website? I’d hate to think Mary’s being dinged for some unknown statute.

And what about full-grown sheep? Would that be acceptable? When does a lamb become a sheep, anyway? Is there a bar mitzvah or quinceanera?

Actually, on second thought, I don’t think I want to know.

Keeping it in the pastoral setting:

Farmer in the Dell

I could probably critique this song for playing into the age-old practice of picking other children from a group for popularity and mocking prurposes. Red Rover, Farmer in the Dell, Smear the Queer…

What, your bullies didn’t sing as they chased you? Did I mention I grew up in a musical?

But kids songs are always going to be cliquey and segregatory. It’s the way in which this particular songs divides that I question.

The farmer picks his wife. Okay, I suppose.

The wife picks her child? Did she stop taking birth control without mentioning it to the farmer?

The child picks the nurse? Who includes their child in this decision?

Then it gets weirder. The dog picks the cat, the cat picks the mouse, the mouse picks the cheese. We’re aware these lesser animals are being “picked” as dinner, yes? I guess we can’t say what we mean, “the cat kills the mouse,” because then the less-popular kids would get picked first.

And then the cheese stands alone. Huh, huh, I used to think when I was a child. Because he cut the cheese, so he stinks. That’s why he stands alone.

Forty-two years of wisdom tells me the last verse probably wasn’t based on flatulence. But to be honest, I can’t think of an alternate explanation for the cheese standing alone. Hell, maybe he really did cut the cheese.

Speaking of food, we’ll all have chicken and dumplings when she comes? Is this a fetish thing? Does the promise of soup really get her going?

Hole in the Bucket

Passive aggressive much?

Look, Henry and Liza, it’s clear neither of you want to do shit around the house. Why not just be upfront about it?

“I need a pedi, dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry.”

“But the game’s on, dear Liza, dear Liza, dear Liza.”

Maybe instead of fetching some water, y’all might want to sign up for counseling. The bucket ain’t the only thing that’s got a hole in it.

Itsy, Bitsy Spider

I don’t have a new, adult reaction to this song. I can merely enunciate my childhood quandary with fancier language.

I know it’s supposed to be a song about perseverance. That brave, brave spider keeps getting back on that horse, er, water spout, despite the deck stacked against him, that ever present rain storm.

Maybe I am supposed to identify with that spider. I could get back in the blogging habit or finish one of those books that are 30,000 words in. Or I’d finally get that Master’s Degree. Or, you know, finish digging for that treasure chest I dreamt was buried in my back yard.

Except that it’s a nasty spider. Are we really supposed to root for him? I can’t be the only one who was rooting for the rain, right?

Oh no, oh no, the spider’s getting closer. Down came the rain and washed that motherfucker out.

Whew.

This Old Man

Dude’s a drunk, right? He rolls home every night. If he was sober, wouldn’t he walk or drive himself home? And it’s happening often enough where he can’t just plan ahead and uber home.

And what the hell is knick-knack? It’s got to be shuffleboard, cornhole, or some other bar game, but he seems to play it ON a lot of things and/or people. On my thumb, on my knee. Knock it off, you lush. Play knick knack on your own goddamned shoe.

And what a shock that he played it in heaven. Maybe he should be keeping track of AA steps, not the number of paddy whacks.

And speaking of giving a dog a bone…

She’ll be riding six white horses when she comes?

Wow, okay.

I’m feeling a little inadequate now.

Messiah Holding on Line Three

A.B. Kelly · April 16, 2017 · Blog Entries · advertising, organized religion, sacrilige, technology · One Comment

So, Jesus’s best friend was a rabbit that fucked a chicken, right?

‘Tis the season when an organization that promotes celibacy usurps a bunch of springtime fertility symbols. Just keep your peep shows to the marshmallow type, buster.

As I mentioned during Saturnalia (what the pleebs refer to as Christmas), I understand that advertising for Christianity’s got to be a little difficult. Back in the nineties, I was annoyed when those “Got Jesus?” bumper stickers started popping up. I thought it was bush league. Maybe Christianity can’t pay the same as Madison Avenue, but isn’t the cause of all inspiration supposed to play for your team? The best you can do is steal somebody else’s ad campaign?

Well, at least there aren’t any commandments against theft or anything. Moses couldn’t be bothered with intellectual property and copyright law.

But I’m a little older now, which might (Might!) mean I’m a little wiser. I kinda get it now. Advertising for any of the various Christian faiths has got to be tough.

“Think you’re a good person? Come in and find out why not.”

“You’re a sinner! Find out how!”

“Limited time offer: Join during Lent and give up meat on Fridays!”

So I’m a little bit more lenient toward religious advertising these days. But I was still a little taken back when I saw this:

Jesus

This fills me with a lot of questions.

I live and work in a pretty high-Latino area, so my first thought on seeing this sign was to read it in Spanglish: Hay-zeus called.

So my first question is: Is this a landscaping issue?

Or is my student calling me about the homework assignment? And if so, can’t he e-mail me?

I’ve noticed that, in my classroom, Jesus seems to be the only Spanish name that nobody anglicizes. Pablo? “Call me Paul.” Jorge? “It’s pronounced George.”

But I’m still waiting for the first “It’s Gee-zus, not Hay-zeus.”

But with this sign, seeing as it was outside a church, I assume that the Jesus who is calling is Mr. Christ. But this doesn’t stop the questions.

Actually, the first question is the same, regardless of if it’s the Savior or my student. Why is Jesus calling? Can he not e-mail me instead?

Maybe Jesus was illiterate. It would fit His position in life. Not sure how many carpenters in the conquered territories of the Roman Empire could read or write. Maybe that’s why everybody else had to write down what He said.

Okay, so e-mail is out. Too bad, Jesus. There are some great websites I could’ve directed you to. (You or you? Do I capitalize You when I’m referring to Him in the second person?)

Okay, so no e-mail. Jesus is calling me on a landline. It’s not even cordless.

Is this a money thing or a technology thing?

I can’t imagine it’s about money. There’s plenty of cash coming in to the Christly coffers on a regular basis. Just ask Tammy Faye Bakker – she was big right around the time Jesus bought that phone. I’m pretty sure Jesus wouldn’t have to pay taxes, either. Partly because He’s a non-profit, but He also seems to have every politician in his pocket. They invoke his name even more than the oil companies and unions, and you know those two groups don’t have to pay for shit.

So it’s about technology. Jesus is opposed to modern contrivances. I guess that makes sense. Idle hands, and all that. Maybe he subscribes to the whole Protestant work ethic. Sorry, Catholics.

But still, this advertisement suggests that Jesus DOES still own a phone. So some form of instant communication is acceptable. As long as it’s analog.

But when, precisely, did Jesus gave up on technology? If the advertisement had shown the telephone chassis instead of just the receiver, I might be able to decipher if He lost hope in the 1950s or the 1980s. According the the Republicans, those were definitely the last two time Jesus loved America. But which one? Does Jesus strike me as a guy who takes the time for rotary dial? Or has He at least allowed for touch-tone technology?

Regardless, it’s clearly either computer or wireless technology that the Savior has problems with. I don’t know which, but I can maybe make an argument for each. Wireless travels through the ether. Maybe that’s where He lives. It goes back to the whole Copernicus issue. If Earth goes around the sun, then where is heaven? And now we know the answer. Heaven is where radio waves reside. Marconi was the one that killed him, not Galileo.

Or maybe it’s computer technology that He’s opposed to. But, Jesus, if you can get past all the free porn, you’d find your name all over social media. Nobody really gets your message, but trust me, your name is everywhere. You and Chuck Norris have cornered half of the meme market by yourselves.

I know. It’s hard to get past all the free porn. But I think you mentioned something about your right hand causing you to sin during the Sermon on the Mount. Or you might not have. I’m not sure. Most Christians don’t actually pay attention to what you actually said.

So I get that you’re opposed to most modern form of communication.

But the problem with calling on the landline is that it’ll probably just go to voicemail. Nobody answers unknown phone numbers anymore. If you really want to get ahold of me, maybe try texting instead of calling. I know that brings up the whole literacy thing again, but honestly, you’ve had a couple of centuries to learn. You really only have yourself to blame.

Regardless, I am at least comforted by one fact. If you’re still using a landline, you won’t know about call waiting yet.

So sorry, Jesus. I heard you were trying to call me, but I must’ve been on the other line.

God damn that busy signal.

Camptathalon 2016

A.B. Kelly · April 6, 2017 · Blog Entries · camping, Camptathalon, guy's trip, male bonding · No Comments

Wow, here we are already planning Camptathalon 2017 and I haven’t even updated the world with the results from 2016. I suck. But in my defense… nah, screw it.Here’s what happened last June.

Editor’s note: The campground right next to ours was called “Little Beaver Campground.” I’m sure you can already see where this is going.

Tony & Sparky arrived Thursday night.

Friday:
6:45 Sparky sleeps in. A Camptathalon record!
6:50 Tony wakes up early. A Camptathalon record!
7:40 The Official Camptathalon Flag is raised:

Oops, almost had an upside down cock.
7:52 The MacGyver Hammock has a door. “You sure you want it up that high if you’re going to be drinking?” (Editor’s Note: “MacGyver Hammock” in background of this picture, after it had been moved down)

7:55 Donuts and Bear Claws – Breakfast of Champions
~9:00 Heading to town for ice. Did not stop on way in last night because it was dark and there was beer to be drunk.
9:45 Rick drives past us while we are trying to thieve WiFi from “hotel” in “town.”
9:55 Sparky: “There’s some really nice looking logs on the side of the road.”
9:59 Tony: “We have to put the other two pubes on ice. You can’t have a foursome with only two pubes.” 0218171606

10:05 Of the four coolers we have, only the smallest one has food.
10:20 “Any request for music? I don’t feel like listening to status.” “Actually, I’m kind of in a static mood.”
10:41 “It’s called a piledriver…”
11:41 Chris arrives.
11:44 “We can all back up another six inches and maybe you’ll fit.”
12:23 Sparky’s MacGyver Hammock shall henceforth be known as “The Little Beaver.” In perpetuity.
12:42 Chris unveils memes:

12:58 Camptathalon 2015 Champion Chris unveils Camptathalon Trophy in its Wisconsin Lunchbox.
13:01 Rick starts singing Frozen.
13:04 Tony tries to get WiFi on Chris’s camping chair.
13:35 “Demi Moore is from Roswell and her bush is what swallowed the UFO.”
13:55 “Where’s my koozie?” “It’s on my finger. I can fit three fingers inside your koozie.”
14:20 Tony claims his genitals will burn holes in the tablecloth.
14:26 Cheese Ball Bucket begins.
14:29 SOCIAL!
14:43 “I have three more guys to play with.”
14:48 Rick apologizes for farting and sheds a tear. (Editor’s Note: Rick wrote “Fuck you, Tony!” next to that note, perhaps questioning its veracity)
14:50 Chris needs more lotion on his mosquito bites. Sparky: “My 7^th grade girlfriend had mosquito bites, too.”
14:57 Tony: “I can’t keep these (Cheese) Balls out of my mouth!”
15:00 Rick almost eats a Carcassonne piece because it is the same color as Cheese Balls.
15:02 “I brought some good beef jerky.” “Oh, I love some jerky.” (Pantomimes masturbation)
15:31 Rick: “This weekend is already crashing and burning.”
15:41 “Dick.” “Ass.” “It’s much too early for dick ass.” “Is it ever too early for dick ass?” “Not sure. Give me more Cheese Balls.”
16:06 This beats being at work.
17:03 “Did anyone bring a target?” “Your chest is a target.”
17:12 “As long as, every time someone takes a leak, they bring back wood, we’re good.”
17:28 Dinner is served.
18:27 Loser Libation revealed: Foster’s Oil Can. (Editor’s Note: The Loser Libation is picked by the Champion and must be consumed by the loser of the poker tournament)
18:28 Official Camptathalon Opening Toast: Pube Beer.
18:35 Chips out. Pic taken. Pube open. (Editor’s Note: While “pic taken” was written in the log, nobody present can’t account for said picture. Here’s the closest we can find: Camptathalon Toast
18:55 “Daniel-san. You cum too fast.”
18:58 “Give me a finger right there.”
19:24 “The Ol’ Ten-Ten. 1-0, 1-0. Everybody’s got a dick in their mouth.” “That will wake me up screaming in the middle of the night.” “You can’t scream with a dick in your mouth.”
20:03 We are not our fathers.
20:14 “Remember that time I picked you up in the lobby and we drank at Dick’s for two hours?”
20:38 Sparky is nearing Foster Territory.
20:50 “I’m finally on top of Tony and it feels good.”
21:28 Nobody out yet. Longest entry poker tourney ever.
21:34 Rick: “I haven’t looked at my cards yet. I’m putting on my vest.”
21:35 “See my vest, see my vest, made of real gorilla chest.”
21:44 Tony goes all in because he has to shit, gets trip-7’s.
22:03 Sparky and Tony all in. Sparky “wins” the Loser Libation.
22:45 Chris out.
22:46 Rick and Tony are tired. Ask permission to split top two point values. Request denied.
22:57 Tony beats Rick

Saturday
5:55 Tony up first. WTF?
6:25 Sparky up.
6:55 “I just realized I have tea bags. I could’ve had tea last night.” “Or we could just wake the other two up with tea bags.”
7:32 Tony throws teabag into Rick’s tent.
7:48 Chris emerges from tent, produces Dick Butt

Dick Butt

8:05 Breakfast. Forgot tortillas and can’t find cornbread, so it’s Breakfast Bowls.
8:20 Skid marks in the underwear. “Did you wipe your ass with your underwear?”
8:40 You can’t call it a nap when it’s 8:30 in the morning.
9:12 Hey, there’s the bear that took our fucking cornbread: Campting Bear
9:46 Sparky starts in on the second half of last night’s Fosters. “Not bad. Still some carbonation.”
9:51 Oh, hey. The cornbread is in the cooler.
10:06 First beer of the day opened.
10:20 Event Two: Whiffle Ball Home Run Derby.
10:30 Tony loses bottle opener ring while throwing whiffle ball.
10:37 Rick is really proud of his epic 2 Homeruns in the Derby.
10:40 First Round: Chris – 7, Tony – 6, Rick – 2 (Best Ever!), Sparky – 3 (Retired with only two outs used)
10:43 Cock ring found!
10:50 Second Round – Chris – 3, Tony – 4 (with six outs used); Sparky – 4 (with seven outs used)
11:06 Final Round – Tony 6, Sparky – 3
11:07 After two events, Tony -8 pts, Sparky – 2, Rick – 2, Chris – 2
11:30 Oh hey, Cornbread!
11:31 Event Three: Adventure Bocce
11:51 “Guys, don’t scuff my balls.”
12:07 Adventure Bocce results: Chris – 11, Tony – 9, Rick – 7 (Won the “Toss-Off”), Sparky – 7
12:08 After three events: Tony – 10, Chris – 6, Rick – 3, Sparky – 2.
12:15 Sammiches.
12:35 Margaritas: A Toast to Scurvy and Dick-Butt.
Dick Butt
12:40 Margaritas are classy when they come out of a 2-liter Sprite bottle.
12:54 Event Four: Slingshot
13:19 Slingshot targets: Adele Fan Meme, Nicholas Cage, Grumpy Cat
13:50 After Four Events: Tony – 10, Chris – 8, Rick – 7, Sparky – 3
14:20 Anne Heche is a pretty good looking dude.
14:36 Event Five: Chipping
15:07 Standings: Chris – 12, Tony – 10, Rick – 8, Sparky – 5
15:08 Tony has come in fourth of every competition since margaritas began. Rubs frisbee golf frisbee on his nads.
15:40 Event Six: The Butter Toss (at Leonardo DiCaprio’s chin) (Editor’s Note: No results recorded, but we did get a picture of the end results)

15:50 Final Event: Cards Against Humanity
15:57 “I had semen. I thought semen would work.”
16:07 With “Stephen Hawking talking dirty,” Chris wins Camptathalon 2016.
16:12 I think about the Underground Railroad during sex.
16:16 The random draw has won twice in a row. (Editor’s Note: They would throw one randomcard in from the draw pile to see if it was funnier than anything they could come up with. Clearly it was.)
16:21 Sparky places second in Cards Against Humanity with “Smegma.”
16:22 Tony takes third with “My Black Ass.”
16:44 Social: “I drink to forget (Blank).”
17:17 The bet is over. We have all lost. The Cheese Balls still exist and reign supreme.
18:09 There is a clearing house in Tony’s ass.
18:21 Sno Balls appear to be made out of napalm. That have a skin flap like a vagina, but are not as flavorful.
18:22 General disagreement over definition of felching. No Urban Dictionary access at 5,000 feet.

Sunday
Butter still on Leo’s chin

Cheese Balls still exist. Saying “Fuck you, motherfuckers. We’re still here!”
Hey look! Cornbread!
And I’ll miss you most of all, Dick Butt.

Dick Butt

Wasting Away Again

A.B. Kelly · November 1, 2016 · Blog Entries, Musings · concerts, Jimmy Buffett, middle aged · No Comments

I turned 42 earlier this month, and tried my best to act 24. I’ve been to three concerts over the last three weeks.

It would have been four concerts if not for a Kenny Loggins health issue. He was scheduled to play at an Indian Casino with Air Supply.

Okay, so maybe these concerts aren’t technically in the “acting like a 24-year old” vein. The acts themselves were more in the “Middle Aged White Male” range. But nonetheless, it was three concerts, hundreds of miles apart from each other, in three weeks, with nary a stop for Matamucil in between. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.

Literally, I got the T-shirts:

First up was a flight to Southern California for Mumford & Sons. It was my birthday present from my wife, so I didn’t even know it would be happening until a few days prior.

Next up was a train trip to Reno to see Straight, No Chaser, an a capella group that sings medleys and various other non-instrumental versions of modern hits. Like “All About That Bass (No Tenors).” That was my anniversary gift to my wife. Concert gifts all around this year.

But I’m not here to write about listening to ten men sing Christmas songs in October. Nor shall I delve into… whatever the hell style of music Mumford & Sons is. Folk? Bluegrass? I tried explaining them to my Mother-in-Law.

“Bluegrass? Are they from the South?”

“No. England.”

“…”

“They play a lot of mandolin.”

“Maybe my hippie brother would like them. He’s been teaching himself mandolin.”

“…”

But I’m here to talk about the cherry on the top of my Middle-Aged White Male Trifecta Sundae, when I lowered the average age at a Jimmy Buffett concert by about a decade. I did not have as great of an effect on the Hawaiian shirt average – my Tommy Bahama kept the ratio perfectly pegged at 1 to 1.

Jimmy Buffett is another musical act that’s hard to classify. His music isn’t overly complex. I’m pretty sure the chord progression on “Fins” and “Cheeseburger in Paradise” is exactly the same. But he’s worth $400 million (behind only Paul McCartney and Bono, according to a Google search), so he must’ve figured something out.

He started out primarily as a country act, and I suppose is still heavily grounded in that particular genre. But I know a lot of Parrotheads that have no love of country music. I sometimes refer to Jimmy Buffett as beach music, but that tends to conjure up images of Brian Wilson and Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello dancing in a bikini.

Oh wait, I know. Jimmy Buffett is drinking music.

But not so much. Because in reality, Jimmy Buffett plays Jimmy Buffett music. He’s worth so damned much because he is his own genre.

Jimmy Buffett is a lifestyle, with maybe a little bit of music attached.

I first discovered Jimmy Buffett when I was in college from a Parrothead who lived on my dorm floor. I assume “some guy in college” is how most people first encounter Jimmy Buffett. Isn’t that the type of alternate lifestyle that college is for? Sure, that “guy in college” must have discovered Jimmy Buffett elsewhere. He was two years ahead of me, so I assume he caught it from a junior when he was a freshman, thus continuing a herpes-like chain reaction stretching all the way back through time.

Someone must have started the chain, but I can’t imagine who. I know there were those old PSA’s from the 1980s (“Where’d you learn to do drugs? “You, okay? I learned it from watching you!”), but I doubt either the parent or the teenager in that ad was pleasantly puffing away to the prospect of visiting that “One Particular Harbor.”

That’s why I think it has to start in college. Because, contrary to how most people classify Jimmy Buffett, his songs aren’t drinking songs. We don’t see the neediness of a “Tubthumping” or “Red Solo Cup.” They aren’t party songs. You don’t crank up the Jimmy Buffett at a rager like you would Beastie Boys or Sublime. Jimmy Buffett is much closer to “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” than he is to “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer.” Even if “Pencil Thin Mustache” references marijuana, you’re not going to puff-and-pass to it like you would to “Gin and Juice.”

I teach high school. I hear a lot of stories about drinking parties. I’ve had plenty of burgeoning alcoholics and chronic addicts come through my room. But I can only think of a very small collection of students who could truly understand what Parrotheading is all about.

The confusion about what Jimmy Buffet is singing about is understandable. His most famous line, after all, is “wasting away again in Margaritaville.” My students would probably say “Yeah, man, I’ve totally been wasted on margaritas, too.”

Okay, margaritas might be too fancy for my students. So maybe “Wasting away again in straight-shot-of-tequila-with-Coors-Light-chaser-ville.”

But anyone who thinks that song is about getting wasted misses the point. One is not wasting away in Margaritaville due to the alcohol content of said drink. It’s the introspection that comes with each successive drink or hour or day spent there. From “it’s nobody’s fault” to “it could be my fault” to “it’s my own damn fault” – one of the most brilliant evolving choruses of all time.

I once got in an argument with an English teacher about whether or not the entire song is a metaphor or not. Even the tattoo is a mental tattoo. Who the hell describes ink on an arm as “a Mexican cutie?” That tattoo has been stamped on his brain, and it ain’t leaving until he blends that next frozen concoction.

I’m right. The English teacher is wrong. What the fuck do English teachers know about metaphors? Seriously. If he really blew out his flip-flops, he could’ve just bought new ones – Margaritaville has a shit-ton of merchandising.

But to understand why Jimmy Buffett isn’t just about drinking and partying, you need to go beyond his most famous title. A better song to reflect what the Parrothead life is about is “Changes in Latitude, Changes in Attitude.”

Sure, Mr. $400 Million might be able to live the lifestyle permanently, the rest of us can’t party all day, every day. We have to wait for, or in some cases force, a change in attitude. The easiest way to do this, and yet the most complicated, is to go on vacation somewhere tropical. That fixes up your attitude right quick.

But sometimes we can’t pick up and shove off to the Mexican Riviera. That’s okay. The change of latitude need not be extreme. Go downtown for the evening. Veer off the home-to-work commute. Date night with the spouse. Whatever it takes to change the attitude, if only for an hour or two.

Carpe diem. YOLO. Make the most of the times that should be made more of. That’s what Jimmy Buffett really is about. Drink? Sure! Party too hard? Absolutely! But make it about enjoyment, make it about reflection, not about obliteration. Because “If we couldn’t laugh, we would all go insane.”

Most non-fans don’t realize how much introspection Jimmy Buffett sings about. It’s not in “Cheeseburger in Paradise” or “Why Don’t We Get Drunk” (and screw?), but you don’t have to delve deep into his track list to find it. It’s the reflection that comes from sitting on a beach or a bar and having a few drinks. Or from talking to the old guy next to you at the beach or the bar.

To understand the appeal and the staying power of Jimmy Buffett, you need to listen to the lines the audience sings along to most fervently at his concerts. It ain’t “Volcano.” Despite the elaborate hands-above-head movement, it ain’t “Fins.” It isn’t even “Margaritaville.”

Those songs all have sing-alongs, but they are rote. People sing the whole song at the same volume. There are no natural crescendos, no particular lines that have more gravitas than the others..

The ballads are where you’ll find that extra connection that defines Jimmy Buffett. “A Pirate Looks at 40” is a wonderfully retrospective song about mid-life crises and how we are never able to do that thing we always thought we were destined to do. Perhaps I should re-title this blog “An Asshole Looks at 40.” But I doubt I could fill it with anything as profound as “I made enough money to buy Miami, but I pissed it away so fast.”

That’s a line that gets the concert crowd warbling. Because we’ve all been there, haven’t we? Everybody’s been Candide, looking back on his time in El Dorado, thinking “What the fuck was I thinking leaving that behind?”

(How do you like that allusion, English teachers?)

Some other artists dally into Jimmy Buffett territory, but few stay for long. Toby Keith definitely has some party songs, and a few of them manage to toe the line between happy drunk and angry drunk. Paul Simon’s an excellent lyricist and musician who has some wonderfully happy and introspective songs. But neither of them have a niche that is entirely of their own creation.

The most obvious non-Jimmy Buffett Parrothead song is “It’s 5 O’Clock Somewhere.” How the hell did Jimmy Buffett NOT write that one? I almost wonder if Alan Jackson felt guilty after writing it. Like “Oh, shit, what is this? This is not an Alan Jackson song!” So he invited Jimmy Buffett to sing along with him and included him in the lyrics. Then he went back to writing more snoozers like “Country Boy.”

The one band that seems to be hanging out in Margaritaville on a more permanent basis is the Zac Brown Band. But consider this: Zac Brown wasn’t alive when Jimmy Buffett released his first album. So maybe that niche is only big enough to be filled once per generation. Zac Brown’s next on my list of concerts to attend. I wonder if I will skew the average age down by a decade, as I did at Jimmy Buffett, or if I will skew it up.

I also don’t know if Zac Brown has quite figured out the retrospective part yet. He can’t sing about a 40-year old pirate if he isn’t even a 40-year old musician yet. I don’t know if the Zac Brown Band has any ballads that sum up a life’s journey yet. They need to add some if they’re still want to be playing new arenas, not state fairs, in forty years.

Jimmy knows this. He knows that people come for the “Boat Drinks” and stay for the “Son of a Son of a Sailor.”

That was evident in how he finished the concert I saw. The main concert ended with “Volcano,” because it’s named the “I Don’t Know Tour.” The first two songs of the encore started out with “We are the People our Parents Warned Us About” and “One Particular Harbor.” The latter is a standard Parrothead anthem and the former is more quotable than singable. It was pretty standard stuff, except for the voracity with which he sang “But Not Yet” after the line “I can see the day when my hair’s full gray and I finally disappear.”

Then he did something that I have never seen in any concert before. After the entire band left the stage, Jimmy doubled back out. I assumed he would give one last wave, but instead he pulled out an acoustic guitar and broke into “He Went to Paris.”

That’s how the concert ended, with Jimmy Buffett alone on the stage, playing one of his softest ballads. And it was brilliant. Because if it’s the “I Don’t Know Tour,” what better way to end than with “all of those answers and all of those questions” that we never quite finish.

And if you sing about the great adventure that is life, there can be no better line to walk off the stage to than:

“Jimmy, some of it’s magic, some of it’s tragic, but I’ve had a good life all the way.”