Early spring in Texas, out in the parking lot of the apartment complex I called home. Cool day, cloudy mostly with some patches of sun glinting through the branches of the trees above me. As sunset deepened, the clearing sky lit up the neighborhood with a diffuse orange glow. 99.9 F° was playing on my […]
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Random thoughts, settings, characters, situations, perhaps leading somewhere
File: Snapsongs
The excitement was palpable: my friend’s teenage brother had scored the deal of a lifetime. From the early fall heat he and his friends carried in the prize: a wood-paneled console stereo that must have been six feet long and could have held a small buffet and a sideboard of decanters on its immensity. My […]
Quick and to the point: along a winter’s day, with the tap-tap-tapping of the furnace minutely echoing through the floor registers through the house, this little scrap of blue-eyed soul would get me stop what I was doing and crowd near the speaker of my stereo. I liked the song — the vocal interplay, the […]
When you’re stuck in a musty filing office running credit cards for the Accounts/Receivable department of a high-tech equipment manufacturer, there’s not a whole lot you can say about the situation. So you tend to try to focus on the positive. Nobody bothered me much, the invoice printer would loudly do my job for me, […]
It was fall, the summer heat was fading, and there was a family of toads living in the rock garden under the windows behind the patio in our first house in Texas. It was the perfect time to be out in the backyard tear-assing around with LEGO spaceships blowing things up, even though you really […]
2003. I’d heard Son Volt from a friend in the late 90s, and I appreciated what I’d heard, but I didn’t really get into Jay Ferrar’s solo alt-country project until a few years later. In the interim, a girlfriend of mine had owned Straightaways, which I found intriguing. Much later, after we broke up, I […]
Five bored young men, stuffed into a borrowed BMW, driving around Austin, Texas in the late afternoon in the late autumn. Windows down, air cool, sunroof open. I can’t remember if it was a Thursday or Friday, but nothing was going on, nothing was on the slate, nothing was happening. Nothing except burning gas and […]
I was most definitely too young to embrace disco in the way it was intended. Although I did wear polyester at times, it was more often in the form of blue-and-red striped ZOOM shirts than pleated flares, and my mother didn’t let any soft drinks in the house, so I rarely got any Coke. But […]
Another scene set here: summer of 1986. It was the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school. Halley’s Comet had been something of a bust, but there were interesting things happening in the summer sky, and I was tracking Mars, Jupiter and Saturn on a huge wall map of Wil Tirion’s Sky […]
Let’s start off with a truism: for anyone who grew up in the 1980s, the Beastie Boys’ album Licensed to Ill was a seminal piece of work. For those in the know, it was the commercialization of a culture that had been building and evolving for at least ten years. For those far from the […]