'sappenin'...

A bit of backstory; before I left for my trip, I downloaded almost 200 GB of media from my buddy Aaron onto an external hard drive. Movies, tv shows, music, audio books...the works. So there's all this unconsumed stuff I've had with me the whole time, and I've barely cracked the cover of any of it. Most central to this morning's story is that there is a whole bunch of jazz music that I haven't listened to yet.

So this morning I'm chillin', reading some news, having a bit of breakfast, and I throw on the headphones to drown out the incessant din of any number of neighbors living their lives. And I decide to try something new... this jazz guitarist called "Mahavishnu." I won't go into the details of why he's called that or anything; but I had done a bit of research and decided to give it a try. I didn't get very far into it...it's okay so far. Just enough like Grant Green/Jimmy Smith to make me say, "okay...yeah, I can dig it..." but juuuust enough like ELP to make me say, "oh hell no." So the jury's still out.

Here's the point: the opening note of one song sparked "No Surprises" to pop into my head. And I immediately thought, "holy crap, that's what I need to be listening to right now! OK Computer!!!" I had to dig out the hard drive and hook it up to my laptop, but it's worth it. Ahhhhh...

So I know what a lot of you are thinking right now. "Ah damn, is he really gonna do it? Is he really gonna be the 10 million and 2^nd shoegazer who writes the loving homage to OK Computer?" The short answer is no. Not right now at least. Suffice to say, I am not someone who would argue with those people who place it squarely at the top of the all-time-greatest-album list. But that's been done, what? 10,000,001 times before, right? So I'll leave it alone...for now.

Not sure why I felt compelled to bring that up. But I thought you should know.

It's funny; I had a whole, regular, "here's the haps" blog all lined up for yesterday. But then I got tagged and ended up writing that whole long thing...plus something for Crazy Melvin about baseball...and was all written out by the time it was over. So the regular blog had to wait...and it will still have to wait cause I'm leaving. Not that I had to tell you that of course...

Okay, so now it's tomorrow. That's today, for those of you reading of course...but most likely not the same today as me. Even if it is the same today (Sunday), you are most likely asleep as I write this (2am PST). Ah time. Gotta love it...

Something I've been meaning to do for awhile now: give a big shout-out to my home-skillet Dave "Capn' Surly" Hogan, an amazing photographer. I've added a link to his online photo collection in my links section. I highly recommend you go check it out, he's really really good and should be doing it for a living.

More random news:

One day last week I was down at the shore and heard these two little Spanish kids running around singing, "hey, ho! Let's go! Hey, ho! Let's go!" It took me a second to recognize it, but then..."holy crap! Those kids are singing the Ramones!" I hoped against hope that they'd break into the rest of the song...but nope, just Hey ho let's go over and over. Still pretty cool.

Been a good week all around. I'm kind of sick at the moment, but that's to be expected: I see people sniffling and coughing and sneezing everywhere I go, and what with the new climate, new diet, new everything, really, it is to be expected that my body would freak out a bit.

Don't you love it when you discover something new and amazingly cool after months and months in a place? I went up to the top of this other big "mountain" (guffaw) the other day; I think it's probably the coolest place I've been yet. But, it's also the newest cool place I've been, so it's hard to be completely objective at this point. One of the things that was really neat about it was that, from up there, I could see the other vantage points from which I've surveyed the city over the past few months. I could remember vividly looking out towards the hill I was standing on and wondering what it would look like standing over there, looking towards the hill I was on...and then I found my way up there. Also, there are several museums at various elevations on the hill, including a military museum at the very top of the hill. It's housed in an old medieval fortress, right on a bluff overlooking the water. So you could stand at the edge of one of the castle walls, look out over the Sea, and imagine hordes of Moors landing their boats on the beach and swarming up the cliffs. Frightening and amazing.