republicans
Disclaimer: this post is about politics, a subject that I hate. I’m neither a political scientist nor an economist so don’t expect any data to back up my arguments. In fact, you can just skip this entire post if you want and I’m sure that we will still be friends.
I’ve wasted several evenings lately watching the Republican primary debates. I could have spent that time reading or listening to “A Love Supreme” or jacking it in the bathroom, but instead I made a conscious decision to sit on my couch and watch the various candidates make their case for being the nominee for POTUSA. The results have been so dismal that it shocks me that any sane person could reasonably entertain the notion of voting for any of them.
On a basic nuts-and-bolts level I understand that Republicans are supposed to be in favor of limited government and lower taxes and all that, but I’ve been continually shocked and appalled by the candidates’ sneering disregard for many American citizens. Herman Cain blamed the unemployed for being, uh, unemployed, Rick Santorum told a gay soldier that he would reinstate “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” and Rick Perry claimed to have never lost a night of sleep over executions in Texas while he was governor despite the fact that at least one one of those executed was exculpated after he was put to death. I know that the candidates are trying to appeal to the hardcore Republican primary voters, but the level of petty meanness is dismaying to watch.
The candidates have also taken a perverse pride in disregarding simple facts. When Cain is confronted with mathematical evidence that his 9-9-9 tax plan is massively regressive and blatantly unfair his only response is to say, “You’re wrong.” Perry has doubts about both global warming and evolution. Evolution! Let’s give him a pass by saying that climate science is a fairly recent scientific development. Fucking Darwin published “On The Origin Of Species” in 1859! In the intervening 152 years science has pretty much made an airtight case for evolution, and yet Perry dismisses it as “a theory that’s out there. It’s got some gaps in it.” I’m sorry, but you can’t be the leader of the free world if you don’t believe in evolution.
This ability to brush aside facts would be laughable if it didn’t also extend to their economic policies. Mitt Romney wants to free banks to accelerate the foreclosure process. Every candidate wants to gut Medicare and Social Security and slash discretionary spending to the bone all the while pledging to not raise taxes ever. Every candidate stated that they wouldn’t accept even a 10-1 ratio of spending cuts to tax increases. Look, I’m no Paul Krugman, but you cannot be a serious candidate for the Oval Office if you can’t even pretend that, perhaps, our country would be a little bit better off if, say, GE paid some fucking taxes.
There are roughly 3798 more primary debates left and to be honest I don’t want to watch any more, but I’m sure I will because I’m a glutton for punishment and I love yelling at my TV. Plus, I’m sure it’s just a matter of time until Michelle Bachmann says we should euthanize kids with Down syndrome, or Santorum pledges to reinstate Jim Crow laws. In a sick way I want Ron Paul to beat a hobo to death onstage because it would finally tear off the mask and reveal this cadre as the small-minded, venal, petty, bigoted, anti-Enlightenment, misanthropic shrews that they are.
health update
I have been rather lucky recently in that I haven’t had a major MS flare-up in over a year, but I’m becoming more and more disillusioned about being diagnosed with MS anyway. Here’s why.
I get this terrible itching on my right elbow. It comes and goes for no apparent reason. It was so bad a couple weeks ago that I went to CVS on my lunch break and bought a tube of cortisone cream. I never imagined it would be MS-related. It turns out that ‘itching’ is an infrequent symptom of MS, and here’s the best part: topical creams are totally ineffective. I might as well have rubbed Nutella on my elbow for all the good it did me.
The list of symptoms for MS is almost endless. Fatigue. Numbness. Sexual dysfunction. Depression. Itching. Pain. No, seriously, fucking ‘pain’ is a symptom. How much more nebulous can your condition be when ‘pain’ is a symptom? Almost anything that can go wrong with the human body can be considered a symptom of MS. Sometimes it seems like MS is all symptoms with no known underlying cause. I’m no doctor but an MS diagnosis itself seems like medical shorthand for “we have no idea what the fuck is wrong with you.”
And because medical science has no idea what MS is, they don’t have any real way to treat it. It’s fucking immensely frustrating. I can take drugs in the hope of not getting a flare-up, but there’s nothing I can take to make it go away. No penicillin. No chemo. Nothing. Imagine that you went to the doctor and said, “Hey, I’m pissing blood. What’s up with that?” And your doctor said, “Well, I don’t have any idea why you’re pissing blood, but take this drug and maybe you won’t piss blood as often.” I think that you might be pretty mad.
Right now I’m lucky. My right toe is numb, my arms tingle and I’m wicked sensitive to air-condioning, but I can function pretty much like normal. Every once in a while I check in on MS websites and read some horror story of people who are so disabled that they have to quit their jobs and I count my blessings. It’s almost enough to get me to try some crackpot hookworm therapy.
the long way home
Do you know what my new number one travel rule is? Do NOT show up late for your return flight. Let me explain how I’ve come by such wisdom.
After two great weeks in Italy Lisa and I set out at seven in the morning from a small town in the mountains for the airport in Rome. I figured that four hours would give us plenty of time, but I had not taken account the atrocious Rome traffic. We sat at a toll plaza for over a half-hour and once we paid the toll we sat some more as the ten or so lanes merged down to a paltry two. Once we got to the airport we ditched the rental car (a Fiat Panda and not an Alfa-Romeo 8C, but whatever, I’m not bitter), and hauled ass to the terminal.
The terminal our airline was at is laid out in the most illogical manner possible. The check-in counters are all at one end of terminal, but the gates are all at the opposite end. And once through the gate you take a tramline to another terminal where you actually get on the plane. We ran the entire length of the terminal only to be told at the check-in that we were shit out of luck. I won’t say it was the worst feeling I’ve ever had, but it’s the most angry I’ve been in many years. I was so visibly upset that Lisa had to tell me to calm down lest the lady who was booking us onto another flight tell us to go fuck ourselves.
Our new itinerary: a three hour wait in Rome, a nine hour flight to JFK, another three hour wait, and finally a brief flight from New York to Boston. With any luck we’d be home by midnight. We checked our luggage and hit the bar.
Somehow we survived both the interminable delay and the interminable flight. We collected our luggage and headed to the desk to ask where to go to get our connecting flight. We gave the guy our flight number and he said, “Oh, that flight’s been canceled.”
You know how in cartoons when something traumatic happens a character will develop a network of cracks and then a butterfly or something will land on him and then he collapses into a pile of rubble? That’s exactly how I felt.
All remaining flights to Boston had been canceled due to weather, so while a nice lady switched our tickets to the first flight Wednesday morning Lisa formulated an alternate plan. I was so mentally burned-out by this time that I was totally useless. After a few brief discussions with the skycaps Lisa led us off to a tramline that would take us to the Howard Beach station where we would hop on the A train. Eventually we wrestled our increasingly heavy luggage up the stairs and through the turnstiles at the Canal Street station in lower Manhattan.
It was now around nine at night and we were trudging toward our last hope: the Fung Wah bus. Just before we got on the subway my phone had just enough juice to confirm that there was a ten o’clock bus and we had set out hoping that it wasn’t sold out. Struggling along Canal Street we found a cop who confirmed that the station was a 15 minute walk away, and let me tell ya: that was the longest 15 minutes of my life. Plunking down the money for those tickets was the best feeling I’d had all day.
We actually had about a half-hour to kill so Lisa went around the corner and came back with a big soda and a box of Popeye’s fried chicken. We sat on folding chairs on the sidewalk and ate while a mother and daughter screamed at each other about missing a train. It was that kind of day.
The bus pulled into South Station just a few minutes before 2 AM this morning, a mere 25 hours after we started our return trip. I’m not even going to mention the fact that our taxi driver almost got us killed on the ride home because in light of all the other fucked-up shit that happened it barely registers as notable.
Oh yeah, I was back at work this morning at 8:30.
The one bright spot in the whole fiasco came while we were waiting for our luggage at JFK. At our gate in Rome I’d noticed an aging rocker-type with floppy grey hair and a guitar slung over his shoulder. I casually pointed him out to Lisa and told her that it had to be Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo. At the carousel in New York Lisa borrowed a pen from somewhere and asked him if he would sign the Sonic Youth bio that I’d brought with me. Which he graciously did.
a midsummer night’s update
Since I’ve apparently gotten too lazy to update this shit on a timely basis I’m just gonna break down the past few weeks in one fell swoop. Believe me when I say that you haven’t missed much.
TV: Imagine my surprise when, after finishing the second season of “Dexter,” I went to Netflix to start season three and found that every episode had been removed from their streaming library. Showtime has decided to limit the availability of the show in an attempt to drive more viewers to their own services, but oddly the first four seasons are available as through-the-mail DVDs from Netflix.
Unfortunately, the quality of Netflix’s DVDs suck donkey dick. Lisa and I made it though the first episode and a half before the disc crapped out. I cleaned the thing with Windex and still it refused to play. Trying to play the third episode actually made my DVD player walk across the room and hurl itself out the window. I’m not about to buy the complete season at BestBuy and I can assure the suits at Showtime that I will not be adding them to my cable package just to watch one show. So, perhaps, “Dexter,” you and I were never meant to be.
My daughter: She spent the week here at the end of June and I was in a fucking tizzy because she was entirely stand-offish and unpleasant. She didn’t want to do anything but watch TV, and she was very remote and cold to Lisa to boot. It was the sort of proto-teenager churlishness that I wasn’t expecting to arrive for at least another few years. Quite frankly, it bummed me out, mostly because it seemed to come from out of nowhere.
Luckily she seems to have made a full recovery from whatever was ailing her. Mealtimes are once again full of gross fart jokes and non-stop monologues rather than long, diffident silences. She’s back to belting out Britney Spears songs at the top of her lungs during the car ride to get ice cream cones. And best of all she’s warmed back up to Lisa. When we all went to the local pool last weekend she pestered Lisa to play with her almost the entire time.
The Red Sox: I don’t have a good feeling about this team. The hitting has been excellent considering Crawford’s slow start and subsequent injury, and J.D. Drew’s utterly predictable futility. But now the pitching has become a huge concern due to injuries to Buchholtz and Lester (and perhaps Beckett). This team can’t survive for long if Lackey and Miller simply have to be counted on every time out.
The trade deadline is coming up at the end of the month and I don’t like that the only players the Sox have rumored interest in are from the National League. I don’t trust pitchers coming over from the NL due to the crippled lineups they regularly face. You, dear reader, have a very good chance at throwing a quality start against a team like the Houston Astros. And I’m not all that thrilled with the idea of replacing our overpriced broken-down right fielder with someone else’s overpriced broken-down right fielder. To put it in Belichickian terms, it’s not “good value.”
Perhaps there are a few sleepers out there on the trade market that I’m not aware of and all the Beltran talk is just a smoke-screen to distract other teams from the Sox’ true intentions. I hope so. But I also hope Lester and Buchholtz come back soon because this team is toast without them.
site update
Hey! I don’t know if you noticed, but I changed the address of this crappy blog.
From now on the URL of this baby is gonna be kmatt45.wordpress.com. Learn it. Love it.
If you’re too lazy to change your reader settings, or if you’ve got the old address saved to your favorites (and if you have then maybe you should get a hobby or something) you will be redirected for a whole year. But the redirect service cost me $12, so don’t expect me to renew it next year. Cheers!
random song/video
“Just Got Paid” by Rapeman
Yes this is Steve Albini’s band of Merry Pranksters with a lovingly bone-crushing deconstruction of the ZZ Top classic. I caught this tune on a college station while I was driving home from the grocery store and my daughter just could not make heads or tails of it.
P.S: I’ve been dying to post this song for ages. It’s rivaled only by “Kim Gordon’s Panties” for best song on the record (read: the song I like the best). Unfortunately Touch and Go doesn’t sell individual tracks and I don’t feel like spending $10 to download the whole album just to keep you amused. So you get this lame YouTube link bullshit.
I’m sure you’ll live.
P.P.S: I actually Googled “die” to make sure I used the correct spelling of the past participle and it still doesn’t look right to me. Some words look misspelled even when they’re not.
weekly soundtrack
Hey, remember when I used to write these on an almost weekly basis? Well the last one I wrote was back in September 2010. In my defense I don’t quite have the access to esoteric musical nuggets that I used to (Oh, how I rue the day that I cancelled my eMusic membership!), but it’s also true that I’ve become incredibly lazy about music lately. Aaaaaaanyway…
“Holdin On To Black Metal” by My Morning Jacket
All my imaginary friends ask me, “What is the big fucking deal with this band, man? What do you possibly see in this stoned-out hippie bullshit?” To which I answer: a sinuous bass line that will get stuck in your head for days, a children’s chorus (and really, what song wouldn’t be improved by a children’s chorus), and the cinematically lavish chords of the bridge. There are more brilliant bits in this one song than in the whole Top 40.
“Strange Condition” by Pete Yorn
I got this song stuck in my head recently while I was placidly enjoying a few pints at a local bar. The radio (or is it satellite radio, or do bars subscribe to some secret musical service) was playing “Down By The Water” by the Decemberists, and I sat there swearing up and down that the harmonica melody reminded me of another song. I was so bothered by it that I actually went outside and stood on the sidewalk humming the melody to myself hoping that it would trigger some kind of association. I finally narrowed it down to this Pete Yorn song. If you’re really into coincidences you should compare the drum intros to both songs as well. I’m not saying an alien intelligence is ruling the minds of singer/songwriters, but I am saying that YOU CAN’T BE SO SURE.
“Salsa Pilón” by ¡Cubanismo!
Perhaps influenced by the Dexter soundtrack Lisa and I have declared this to be the summer of Cuban jazz. Last year was the summer of funk, and we spent a huge chunk of time listening to Parliament and Rick James and it was awesome. The funny thing is that after we decided on Cuban jazz I remembered that I have several CDs of the stuff. The funny thing is that I have no idea why I bought them in the first place.
random thoughts
Pretty sad to see otherwise sane baseball people turn into squealing babies after Buster Posey got his ankle smashed into creamed corn trying to block the plate. Buster Olney launched a week-long diatribe claiming there should be a rule against catchers blocking the plate, as if a line in a rule book would ever stop what happened to Posey. The catcher is the last line of defense between a runner and home plate, and while there is a rule preventing the catcher from blocking the plate unless he is in possession of the ball, it probably hasn’t been invoked since 1892. Plain and simple part of the catcher’s job is to try to prevent runners from scoring on close plays. Catchers are hockey goalies without quite so much padding. Read this article and you’ll see that the play in question had more to do with the choice of the runner than with Posey. Scott Cousins chose to steamroll Posey even though pretty much any player with a modicum of skill could have slid around his tag to score. So it’s not that catchers need to be protected from their better judgement (MUST BLOCK PLATE!), it’s that runners must be stopped from treating catchers like tackling dummies. If you follow Olney’s reasoning you can make a case that batters should be banned from standing in the batter’s box because Tony C. got hit with a pitch.
I’ve become the worst kind of fraud Bruins fan. Frankly, I embarrass myself. I know next to nothing about hockey. I never watch the Bruins during the regular season. Everything I pretend to know about the team I’ve stolen from Toucher and Rich. Yet since the playoffs started I have made it a point to watch all of their games. Actually, almost all. There was a game or two against Philadelphia on Versus which is not included on my basic cable package. When the Bruins advanced to the Eastern Finals I begged Lisa to spring for the upgrade sports package so I could watch the games (Random aside: the sports package includes the MLB Network, which is awesome, and the YES Network, which is not awesome.). I’m happy that I did because I got to see Game Two, in which Tyler Seguin played one of the most dominant periods of hockey ever (two breathtaking goals and two assists), and Game Seven, which in terms of sheer nerve-wracking drama rivaled any other sporting contest I’ve ever seen. I was yelling so loud at the TV during the third period that I was afraid I might wake up my daughter sleeping in the next room.
Lisa and I finished watching “Six Feet Under” a couple weeks ago. It’s the kind of series that affected me so much that I feel like I should write a whole post about it, but I probably won’t. Because I’m the most intellectually lazy person you’ll ever waste two minutes of your day reading since you stopped reading Howie Carr’s column back in 1993. After much debate and negotiation we’ve decided to take a run at watching “Dexter.” We’re streaming it on Nexflix so the picture quality leaves a lot to be desired, and Lisa finds the central premise of the show (serial killer as vigilante) highly suspect, but we’re both engrossed by the first season’s Ice Truck Killer mystery. Yup, we’re just two lovebirds snuggled together on the couch with our herbal tea watching a show about one serial killer trying to track down another serial killer. Nothing wrong with that.
random thoughts
I’m not one to brag, but today marks eleven months since Lisa and I got married and we’re still on speaking terms with one another. This is hands down my best marriage ever!
We bought our tickets for our honeymoon last week. Two weeks in Italy. Now if I can figure out how to rent an Alfa Romeo 8c while we’re there my life will be a complete success.
Gorman Bechard, the director of “Color Me Obsessed,” posted a link to my review on the film’s Facebook page and that pretty much blew my mind. In all honesty I don’t even know how he found it. If you Google “Color Me Obsessed reviews” this blog is probably somewhere on the thirty-fifth page of results.
I think I may have gotten a handle on my new job. I’m now able to parse the information on the screen pretty quickly (Although there are still slip ups. Just the other day I sent a biker for a job that wasn’t going to be ready for another two hours because I neglected to ready the “ready at” time. Luckily literally everyone else in the office saw it and yelled at me immediately, so I told the biker to forget it.), and I’ve gotten better at remembering what twelve bike messengers are doing at any given time, which makes it easier to avoid sending five bikers to the Prudential Tower at the same time. It’s actually gotten to the point where I keep a browser window open so I can check in on Twitter from time to time while it’s slow. If someone told me three weeks ago that I’d be checking my email while I was hoping more jobs came in I would’ve told them they were the craziest fucker on the planet.
color me obsessed
Me and my rock n’ roll buds went to a screening of Color Me Obsessed, a documentary about the Replacements, which played the other night as part of the Boston Independent Film Festival. The film dutifully traces the narrative of the band from inception to their slow dissolution, but it diverges wildly from typical rockumentary style by relying entirely upon the recollections and impressions of the band’s fans to tell the story. The film includes not a single note of the band’s music.
As such the film serves less as a history of the band (which, let’s face it, you could read about on Wikipedia if you really were interested) and more as an ode to the way they touched nearly everyone who ever heard, saw or knew them. By interviewing people who formed such an intimate connection to the band’s music the filmmaker gets to tell a story bigger than the rise and fall of a commercially unsuccessful band. He’s able to chart the exact effect the band had on the people who were lucky enough to have heard them.
Let me put it this way: there are very few bands in the history of music who can do what the Replacements did. Look, I love the Rolling Stones, but when I listen to their records I don’t hear the sound of my life coming back at me through the speakers. The Replacements, on the other hand, were able to give voice to all the inchoate rumblings of my soul, and do it in a way that tied their songs forever to those emotions. I’ll never not get teary-eyed listening to “Valentine” because it so perfectly encapsulated a certain set of feelings I had a long time ago. You just don’t forget about a band that can do that to you, even if their last record was released 20 years ago.
In the spirit of the film I’ve decided to include a song not by the Replacements, but about them. Somehow it seems fitting.
“We’re The Replacements” by They Might Be Giants
