I mention it only because these posts serve as a mental note. I honestly don’t miss it at this point. Although it’d be pretty cool to get hold of a cigarette machine. How cool would that be to have in the house? People have jukeboxes, pinball machines, bars and shit like that. I want a cigarette machine…and not some fancy thing. I want the old 70′s/80′s shit where you plunked money in and had to pull that lever out to drop the pack of smokes. Like This.

All in all it kicks ass.

This week covered Grunge – trying to see where it fit and talking to the artists to see where they felt they fit into the big picture of heavy music and metal. Which leads me to my point:

Back in the day, ‘typical’ grunge folk (the artists, fans, bands – the scene) struck me exactly as the stereotype portrayed them…as whiny, mopey, pretentious faux-intellectuals who took themselves too seriously and were too cool for anything.

Upon seeing these people 20 years later as full grown adults in their 40′s and pushing 50, I was surprised (or maybe I wasn’t) to find that nothing has changed. Except it’s even more eye-roll worthy and rage inducing to see them still acting like that.

I can sum up most of the interviews like this, “Heavy music before us sucked. Heavy music since us is a rip off…and sucks. You’re stupid if you like anything else. Music reached perfection back in my day when I was coming of age and I don’t realize that everyone thinks that about the music they grew up with. I’ve become exactly the walking stereotype I claim to stand against. Get off my lawn.”

These people were lame 20 years ago and they’re still lame today. Not enough of them killed themsleves. But there is hope – many of the bands are getting back together so there just might be some additional overdoses and shotgun blasts in their futures. We can hope, right?

—

And Geico brought back the stupid-ass wee-wee-wee pig for a new commercial and I hope whoever made that decision goes on tour with one of the fucking reunited grunge bands.

Might as well start at the very beginning. I’m thinking the whole thing should be a picture book.

I expect this trend to continue in 2012.

That is all.

One of my favorite bands was Saigon Kick (unfortunately famous for “Love Is On The Way” in the early 90′s). Owl Stretching is their Guitarist/Vocalist and a few other guys who’d been officially or unofficially in the band (or not) making new tunes and it really sounds a lot like old SK.

When I was a kid, I lived in the same house from a few months before my 4th birthday until I moved in December of the year I turned 18. That was 20 years ago this month. I lived in that house for 179 months – just shy of 15 full years.

In the 20 years since I moved out of my parents house I’ve moved 17 times if you count the short stays at hotels when we’d make big moves. If you ignore those month-long stays and just count it as part of the moving experience then I’ve moved 13 times. Of those moves two were short stints back to the parents for a total of 3 months. Those moves take place over 6 different cities/areas.

We bought this house three years ago and as of this month, it’s the longest I’ve lived at one address since leaving home as a kid. In April, the Dayton area will serve as the area I’ve spent the most time since then.

I guess for us this area has slowly become home. Both my wife and I were born and raised in western PA. Different areas, but still western PA. My daughter still identifies with western PA to a small degree. She was born there, although I doubt she remembers it as we moved when she was about a year and a half old. But we returned in 2003 and stayed until we headed out here in 2006. She’s 14 now, but she was 8 when we moved here. She was a third grader starting at her third school in 4 years. My son however, pretty much knows this area as home. He was born in Jacksonville, FL. We left there before he was two months old. When we came to Dayton he was just 4. He’s 10 now. It’s all he knows. The only school he’s ever gone to is the one he’s at now.

It probably seems crazy to move around that much, but I don’t think it was bad. It’s easy to get complacent and jumping around as much as we did for so long kept it exciting. We generally followed the opportunity first and foremost. Now that the kids are older, the focus has shifted more towards stability. When you’re the ages of my kids, moving would suck balls. However, I do think all the moving when they’re younger is good. They see a lot of things, meet a lot of different people – generally learn to be adaptable.

We don’t really have a hard, concrete plan looking ahead. The general goal is to try to stay here until the kids are adults…which means 8 more years for the youngest to hit 18. Realistically 9 for him to finish school. After that, who knows? Suddenly, we’re not quite as tied down any more. Possibilities are endless…except for Florida. Florida is the worst. We’ve gone twice and couldn’t wait to escape both times.

At any rate, it’s weird to think I’ve spent more time in this house than anywhere else I’ve lived since that house I spent my childhood in. Even if we do stay here another 9, that puts us up to 12. I wonder if I’ll ever live at one address as long as I lived with my family in that house as a kid?

If I had any idea then that someday it’d be described as, “That old music my Dad listens to” – my head would’ve exploded.

Now I can finally start coverting my VHS collection that spans as far back as 22 years and includes roughly 6 gazillion tapes.

That article was posted 16 years ago this week.

Amazing how someone standing right on the cusp of the big explosion of the Internet could be so blind to what was about to happen. Such gems as:

The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

and

Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn’t—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

Hilarious.

My little sister had a ton of these books. I read so many of these as a kid…at an age that was inappropriately high for the material.