| Dangerspouse Rides Again |
Garage - Track
 
|
Mar. 12, 2005 - 2:57 p.m. I Know It's Only Rock and Roll... 3. Almost immediately post-coital though, she realized: "Oh SHIT! It's SATURDAY! You have to go to work, and I woke you an hour early just so I could get myself off!" She felt so guilty for blowing me that she fixed breakfast and served it to me while I killed an hour playing Grand Theft Auto. It's good to be king. 4. I kicked ass during my brief stint on the Playstation, completing the Pimp Mission (so now the hookers pay ME for sex - show me any other consumer good in the world that knows its target demographic better) AND conquering two more neighborhoods for the Grove Street Greens. 5. When I showed up for work my buddy Dave tossed a package to at me as I came through the door. It was a Modesto Nuts Cap! I hate baseball, but I get a real kick out of some of the minor league caps. It fit perfectly. What a guy! Although we spent a half an hour arguing over the nut logo - is it a peanut or an almond? The web site says "almond", but one of us so vehemently disagreed that he almost started crying. What do you think? (And you'd BETTER not say "almond".) 6. And best of all, more momentous than the carb-fest, booze-fest, boink-fest, game pimping, and new lid....I HAVE INTERNET ACCESS AT WORK TODAY! In honor of the felicitous alignments of events today, which has caused me to feel so expansive.... As I've whined about numerous times here, I set out for work at the circadian defying hour of 2am, 5 days a week. The mind is a foreign country at 2am, full of unfamiliar accents and odd landscapes. I drive to work thinking strange thoughts, craving strange things, and listening to strange music...none of which I have any desire for during the daylight hours when my mind returns home. One of the most important considerations I face at 2am, as I start my 50 mile trek across pack ice and virgin tundra, is 'how the fuck am I gonna stay awake THIS time?' Almost invariably, the answer is "radio". I know, I know. I've got a Nakamichi deck in the WRX, with 157 tweeters hidden in the ceiling panel and two 10 inch woofer cabinets where the back seat is supposed to be. Seven amps with their crossovers, mysterious blinking lights and constant output of ozone cram every spare inch of my trunk. When I turned the juice on the first time it stalled my car from the power drain. If I hike the volume past '3' my rear view mirror vibrates off. And what do I pump through a sound system that would be overkill at a System Of A Down concert? BBC WorldService news. I got roped into listening to these guys - including 'the sport' - early on, when two things became glaringly apparent to me: 1. American commercial news stations suck. And I should know. Unless you can pick up rebroadcasts of NPR overnight - and I can't - you'd get the impression from local stations that: 1. The only murder to happen in the US since OJ was Laci Peterson. And 2: A 3 inch snowfall (in *gasp!* winter) is justification for wall-to-wall weather reports, pre-empting even a vice presidential assasination (wishful thinking). 2. The sound of snare drums at 2am makes my hair bleed. However, lately, even the stunning news of the historic Test Match between India and Pakistan hasn't been enough to completely wrench me from Morpheus' grasp. I think it's because I've had to set my alarm at least a half hour earlier than normal for the past several weeks, to deal with the poor road conditions caused by unceasing snowfall. Whatever the reason, I've found myself literally almost nodding off during reports of Robert Mugabe's latest baby eating outrage. So last week, after a particularly intimate flirt with an oncoming semi (sorry, "lorry") that didn't register with my optic nerve until I was almost a foot into its container bay, I decided to hit The Button. A brief dimming of my headlights as the alternature struggled with the surge, a quick whiff of ozone, and the CD panel glowed to life. And on came Enya. Enya? Oh my god, no! Some months ago I briefly fell under the spell of that insipid "Only Time" song, and in one of my more shameful moments purchased the entire cd when I saw it on sale. I punched the 'Next' button. D'OHH! Kenny G! *Next* ZAMFIR?! Jesus H. Soporific Christ! Was my entire deck loaded with auditory Xanax? Yup. I have no idea why, and apparently no shame. But every single cd in that 10-magazine loader would bore even Mother Teresa to tears. And she's dead. The situation had to be remedied, and fast. Thankfully, the nifty neat-o Dell I sprang for a few months ago came bundled with a cd-burner. And despite a genetic propensity to fuck up anything more technologically complex than a pencil, I actually mastered the "drag-drop-copy" routine within weeks. So now it was time to throw together a disc of up-temp hits guaranteed to keep my eyelids elevated even after a fifth of Everclear and two bottles of NyQuil (a not-unlikely scenario). And so I did. I rifled through my collection of cd's I'd been stealing from every radio station I've worked at since the early 90's and plucked out the most up-beat, loudest, sometimes funky, sometimes hokey, set of tunes that caught my ear. That night I cranked the volume all the way to 4 and listened to every track completely through, twice. By the time I got to work a hairline crack had developed in the passenger side rear window of the WRX, and two of my teeth were rattling like maracas. And I thought 'Gee, I bet others would appreciate a cd full of ridiculous noise, too!' All of which brings me (finally) to The Challenge. I know that some of you clowns, like tuff517, Irish Blue Eyes, gnomad, among many others, consider yourselves to be practically idiot savants about anything recorded since Edison's wax rolls. All I want you to do is send an e-mail to: [email protected] with the subject heading "I'm Ready To Lose". In the body of the message include a mailing address and your name (diary name, if you've got one). I will then burn you a copy of my Disgustingly Upbeat DangerMix, and eventually get around to mailing it off as soon as I save up postage. (BTW, thanks to lovely fetishist Amber for generously setting me up with a Gmail account. May your welts never stop hurting so good, babe!) Now, when you get said Dangermix...play it. And play it again. And write down the title of every song, and the artist responsible for it, then e-mail that list back to me. If you get all the tracks correct, YOU WIN!! If not... You owe me, suckah. Yessir, by accepting The Challenge, you agree that if you fuck up EVEN ONE measely song title/artist, you will pay up. How much? Hmmmm. I thought long and hard about this. I was gonna make it $45, because I really want the new Grand Tourismo 4 that just got released, and it would be nice if somebody else paid for it for once. But then I remembered that many of my readers are Starving Students / Incarcerated / Pensioners / Retarded / Southerners (sorry if some of those are redundant), and that might constitute a severe slashing in their WalMart budget if they lost. So I settled on...the cost of postage. Yeah, that sounds good. If you don't score a hundred percent, you agree to look at the top right corner of the plain brown wrapper I'm sending these things in (labled on the back, 'NAMBLA dues') and mail me back that amount. If you feel particularly sheepish for being so musically ignorant, you can tack on an extra .50 for the cost of the CD-R as pennance. But here's the good news, for those who think even THIS is particularly miserly of me: 1. You don't have to send me that sum in cash, if you don't have it handy! Go buy me a $1.19 pair of sock garters from Goodwill and send them out. Or if you're THAT hard up, just find something lying around the house that you have no need for, of approximately the same value, and bundle IT up. A toddler's old juice cup. A well chewed dog toy. Half a toilet paper roll (un-used, please). I'll take anything, as long as it reminds me that I BEAT YOU when I look at it. 2. You don't have to abide by the rules. Even if you are completely clueless about every single goddam track on this cd, what am I gonna do? Drive out to your house and beat you silly for 63 cents in postage? I might have in my younger days, but now that I'm married.... Anyway, I *hope* that you would have the strength of character to abide by a laughably easy set of rules. But even if you don't...I'm easy. Shoot me an e-mail and have fun at my expense. So, what all can you expect on this gem in a jewel case? Who knows! It could be anything - Klesmer, Broadway tunes, Disco, old R&B, Swing, R&R, Classical, even Spoken Word. As long as it has kept me awake on my drive, it's fair game. The only hint I can give: there is no hip-hop. Sorry. The base lines in Rap feel like someone hitting me in the back of the head with a Louiseville Slugger at that hour. A lot of the tunes will be instantly recognisable...and probably contemptable to many of you. "You've gotta be kidding - he listens to THAT?" is a common phrase I expect to be uttered over one track or another. Hey, I make no apologies. The only criterium I had was that the track keep me awake at 2am. As I said, at that hour the mind craves strange things. So waddaya say, Spanky? You down with this? If you are, get me that e-mail soon. Contest entries end a week from today (Saturday, March 19). Bring it, Suckah! . ****************************************************************************************** . In other news, the pirate Poolagirl apparently once had a penis. She claims it was really just a long, cylindrical hive. Uh-huh. (I still would have done her.) . ******************************************************************************************* . Well, NewWifey(tm) just called. She's making another pizza tonight with the leftover dough! I'm to pick up more cases of Adult Beverages on my way home from work for the festivities. Woo hoo!! And don't forget: tomorrow is Sunday. Don't bother phoning between 4 and 4:20am. Rock on, kids!
|
