Soundtrack to my life 3) the more recent memories edition

There are the songs we love and then there are the songs that have stories behind them. Songs that, if someone (Dear God, please not Michael Bay) makes a movie about you one day, will be on the soundtrack. These are some of my songs and some of my stories. In no particular order because I'm exhausted

Rascal Flatts – Life Is A Highway
When the movie Cars came out, it was immediately Ryen’s favorite. And to be fair, I liked the movie too. It had a decent soundtrack, a nice plot, the animation was solid and it was Pixar and Pixar rocks hard. So I got Ryen the soundtrack thinking that he’d listen to it for a few of the songs. I mean I like the James Taylor song on there, John Mayer’s cover of Route 66 was good (I still prefer Chuck Berry) and I can appreciate Randy Newman as long as it isn’t daily. But no, Ryen’s got one favorite song and I can never argue that the kid doesn’t have focus and dedication when it’s something he loves. You tell him to take time on his handwriting and he’ll bitch and whine and complain, you tell him to work on his book reports and spelling and he’ll be arguing with you about why he shouldn’t have to, but man when that kid loves a song, he loves a song. There was a period of time after he got that soundtrack where I’m sure he had just this one track on repeat played for a period of time that, in most civilization nations, would constitute cruel and unusual punishment. And he loved it. I’m sure he’s still got it memorized to this day. Bonus points if you know who’s Mad Mad World album had the original version of Life is a Highway. Anybody?...Anybody? Tom Cochrane.

Faith Hill – Breathe
The year was 1999 and I was at USC working three part time jobs and trying to sustain a long distance relationship which, by the way kids, never work. I was getting ready for one of my jobs and had either MTV or VH1 on the TV so that there was background noise. I got a phone call and bless the gods of caller ID it was the girlfriend. So I take the call. Now we had been having a rough time as it was and things were progressively spiraling towards epic failure. On this particular call she told me she had cheated on me. That was the first time she told me she had slept with someone else. And I was pretty fucking devastated. Playing on the TV at that time was Faith Hill’s Breathe. I don’t know why in particular I remember that so vividly except that I always thought it was a wonderful song. Since that night I’ve never really ever had any positive associations with Faith Hill songs. There was this song she had while I was in high school where one of the lyrics was something about centrifugal motion…I remember that because I was a total fucking physics nerd. And I generally liked her music. It was country but not country enough that it sucked or required me to lose teeth and brain cells to appreciate. But ever since that night I’ve never been able to associate any Faith Hill song with anything good. I can hear this song on the radio and flash back to the moment in the conversation where there’s that apprehensive lull in the conversation. The “I need to tell you something…….” moment where you know that nothing possibly good can follow that line. Not as much anymore, time passes and old feelings of betrayal and anger fade into feelings of “thank fucking God that’s not my problem” but still there’s pain that I can recall whenever I hear the song. And it’s a lovely song but I still can’t stand it. Let that be a lesson to you kid(s), long distance never works and it will destroy otherwise reasonable country music for you too.

Marwood – One Mile
One of the speech kids I used to work with who still does speech in college occasionally has me read through some of his material and give feedback. Josh, this is the story of how your ADS got me a phone number date from the cute girl at the bank….who I ended up never calling again, because, like, oh my God the upward inflections, like constant use of the word “like” and like lack of…..just NO. But I digress. So I have this regular habit of cashing my expense checks. The cash goes into an account for Ryen less a couple of bucks for coffee or lunch or whatever that day. And I get into the regular habit of getting cash from the bank tellers and not the ATM because I don’t trust ATMs and regularly forget my PIN. Product Keys for MS Windows, those I have memorize. My four digit security PIN, who the hell can remember that? Again I digress. So there’s this girl who, I used to think worked at the bank but the more I think about it I guess we just had similar schedules. Or she hangs around in banks way too much. One day I’m walking to the little stand to fill out the slip so I can cash my check and there’s the girl, Andrea, with this “Barack the Vote!” t-shirt on. And in typical male fashion I was oblivious to anything else going on around me….except for the song currently playing on my MP3 player, which was Marwood’s One Mile. I’m humming along, “how is it that find myself, stumbling drunk on a Monday,” and the next my horrible vision picks up sight of a well stretched shirt. A day or two later, Josh asks me to look over his After Dinner Speech and there’s a reference in there comparing him to a political figure. I scratch it out and replace it with a comment like…”no try someone else, maybe Obama” inspired mostly by the fact that Andrea was entirely Baracking the shirt. So Josh comes up with some very good lines, and he’s got great timing so the speech does ridiculously well. It wins if I remember correctly. Fast forward some, I happen to be in the bank and Andrea is there and I mention to her that, “hey, your shirt helped a guy I know win a speech competition.” And of course she looks at me like I’m batshit insane, which, being honest, probably isn’t too far from the truth. But I go on to explain the story and manage to score her number. At the time I was in a relationship and oh like, my like, fucking god, like, this girl and her like, upward like, inflections. I would have purposely choked on a roll if we had to sit through an entire dinner together, but still, singing a Marwood song about being drunk on a monday, made my lack of any public shame even more pronounced and her shirt did help inspire a win. Worth it.

4/17/2009

Here's the thing. It's 3 AM. And I'm pissed. Seriously pissed. My left hand is semi-nonfunctional at the moment because I slammed it into a cinder brick wall. That pissed. To the point that I know I should sleep but I also know I won't be able to. That pissed.

In the interest of non-disclosure, since this is public, I'm not going into details. What lies below is two versions of the resignation letter I'm drafting now. Three things to note before I go into this. 1) I was at this point in Dec. and left it to a coin flip. Change is coming I was told. Be patient, we're changing. Fuck change. I'm all about being fates bitch again. I went against what fate told me to do and now I'm seriously fucking regretting that decision. 2) I will be on vacation from 4 May through 8 May. I am hoping that a week away from my job will give me necessary time and space to decompress and relieve the really fucked headspace that I'm in now. 3) Failing that, I will deliver one of these two letter. I don't know yet which.

Version 1:

Due to what I see as continuing lack of concern for the interests of its customers and questionable strategy, I regretfully resign my position at the company. I leave with no ill intent for the company and wish you all the best of success. I believe that my continued employment here is in the best interest of neither the company nor myself. The reasons for my departure are numerous and would at this point appear petty to reiterate. Suffice it to say that continuing here would be a pointless exercise in continued frustration and mass profanity. Two weeks hence my departure will be completed and should my help be required after that point with regards to anything job related, calls for support with the product set and services can be made to my cell phone at a rate of $500 per hour, billed in six second intervals. Plus taxes. That would come close to paying me enough to put up with the jackassery I've had to over the past few years. If it matters, I don't expect a letter of recommendation and I won't ask for one. Screw you guys, I'm going home.

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Version 2:
It is with regret that I resign my position. In my view, continued employment at the company does not serve the best interest of the customers, the company or myself. I leave with no ill will and only a few regrets. One of these days I'll learn not to drop inappropriate notes on the desk of President. It is my belief that a lack of professionalism and customer focus is well established at the company and for my contributions to that, I sincerely apologize. I hope that in the future, positive change will take shape to make the company successful.

In preparation for my departure I would like to inform you of the following. I have deleted any information or files realted to my work that was contained on non-company storage media, including things like my USB flash memory drives. Copies of all such files may still be found on my work laptop as well as on network based storage such as shared network drives and the sharepoint document repositories. I suggest that prior to my departure arrangements be made to securely transition the data on my laptop to someone else or that it be erased.

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So right now I'm planning on one of those. I've got one week left before I have my first vacation in over two years. I have no plans for that vacation. I have no intent to do anything right now other than cut myself off from the job for a week. Should that somehow miraculously change my opinion, great, but right now.....I'm leaning towards the first version.

Soundtrack to my life - Part 2 - stories from Di edition

There are the songs we love and then there are the songs that have stories behind them. Songs that, if someone (Dear God, please not Michael Bay) makes a movie about you one day, will be on the soundtrack. These are some of my songs and some of my stories.

Natasha Beddingfield – Say It Again / Put Your Arms Around Me
I’m incredibly sarcastic. It’s one of my better qualities. It also means I have a tendency not to be able to easily say feely things. You know the old Jim Croce song “So I had to Say I Love You With a Song”? Shut the fuck up, I’m not that old, you just have horrible taste in music. Right. Yeah. And you listen to fucking Coldplay, so don’t go criticizing me. Anyway, yeah so I can’t say some things very easily. I do eventually grow a pair just that sometimes it doesn't quite come out right. I think I knew a few months in that whatever we had was a comfortable thing, still couldn't say it though. But when I did end up working up the nerve to say the four letter l-word to Di for the first time, I ended up quoting lyrics from two Natasha Beddingfield songs. I didn’t really mean to, it was just easy to have someone else’s words to say and thank fucking Christ I wasn’t quoting George Michael or Phil Collins. Shut the fuck up I’m not that old.

Ben E. King – Stand By Me
The only song I ever sang the relatively few times I did the karaoke thing with Di. I don’t know why. Usually I’d opt for a Jim Croce song or a cover of some old song from Michael Buble but for whatever reason this was the only song I ever sang.

Nina Gordon – Straight Outta Compton
I’m a huge fan of cover songs. Brian Ibbott you are fucking awesome. Coverville. Listen to it. Love it. But I digress. So the rap song off of N.W.A’s second album but sung by Nina Gordon, formerly of Veruca Salt. Picture a skinny white girl working “you too boy if you fuck with me. Police are going to have to come and get me off your ass” like a folk singer in a coffee house. That’s what this song is. Except that when you don’t really listen to the words, it seems like a pretty chill, mellow song. So I have this set of MP3’s that I have to relax with. Norah Jones, Eva Cassidy, Robert Cray, Colin Hay, they’re in the playlist as well as Nina Gordon. Only Di made a CD from that playlist and took it with her to work. Now at the time she was caring for some guy with stage four cancer up in Kaimuki. And she takes the CD with her because sometimes the songs help her patients to relax and pass the time as well. The radio is okay but they play the same songs every forty minutes and TV is boring in the afternoons, which is when she usually works. I should note that I met this guy twice, once was his funeral. The first time I met him was right after I made this CD because of what happens next. Now keep in mind I wasn’t there so I got this story second hand but; the mix I use to relax has a lot of cover songs on it. Norah Jones’ cover of Wild Horses for example. So the guy hears Wild Horses and starts talking to Di about how he remembers his son driving him nuts playing the Rolling Stones original version of Wild Horses. So they start listening to the other songs. They’re getting into it talking about stuff, I’ve got Richard Marx on the playlist so they’re talking about the movie Princess Bride. Bunch of stuff. And then Nina Gordon comes on. This is a relatively conservative Japanese family. I think Miles Davis would sound like rap to this guy. So Nina Gordon singing “a crazy motherfucker named Ice Cube, from the gang called Niggas With Attitude” right about flips this guy out. And Di, I guess, didn’t really listen to the songs before she burned the CD so she didn’t realize what was going on until it was a little too late. So she scrambles around to try and figure out how to skip to the next track and the guy…I want to say his name was Ben, I might be wrong, I think it was B name though, sees her and says something to the effect of “don’t worry about it, let it go” so they sit there and listen to a skinny white chick do a mellow rap about shotguns and murder…..and then she calls me afterwards and the fallout from this. Well, I’m not going to go into it. Far better to let your imagination roll with it I think. Suffice to say when I did meet Ben...Bill???...Bryant???...FUCK! I swear it was a B name, we got to talking about some of the music and he’s got pretty good taste in music and he even gave me a couple of old 45’s that I can’t play because I don’t have a turntable but still it’s neat to have some old vinyl and I ended up getting together a collection of a bunch of songs, like almost 24 hrs worth and we loaded up Di’s iPod and got her a pair of speakers so they put the thing on random just let a bunch of mellower songs go through, talk some whatever. I’d love to say that one of those 45’s was the original version of the stones’ Wild Horses but that would be too awesome. Still a really neat guy and I totally got my ass kicked around for that one even though it wasn’t my fault. And it never would have happened if Veruca Salt didn't lose Nina Gordon.

Soundtrack to My Life

There are the songs we love and then there are the songs that have stories behind them. Songs that, if someone (Dear God, please not Michael Bay) makes a movie about you one day, will be on the soundtrack. These are some of my songs and some of my stories. In no particular order because I'm drunk.

Eric Clapton – Wonderful Tonight
Everyone has their firsts. This was the first song that I learned to pick on a guitar and learned the bass lines for. Not sure if I remember them now, but it’s still probably there somewhere in muscle memory. Oh, but at the time I was so happy with myself. I don’t know how to read music well and this song I learned by ear; by listening to the track over and over and playing it and probably annoying a bunch of people in the process. It was like a personal accomplishment for me. Like running a marathon or climbing a mountain or whatever the hell it is you outdoors people do for fun. The funny part I suppose is that once I learned how to play it I never really played it that much afterwards and I guess sometimes that’s just the way things roll. You can be so proud of an accomplishment and then it’s like…so what? And that’s okay.

REM – Document album, track 5 – It’s The End of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)
I know, by heart, the album, the track number and the dong duration. This was one of those songs that totally didn’t make any sense at all but you still had to love it. Afternoons sitting idly in high school I can remember playing this CD through and through but always stopping to replay this song on in particular over and over. And it brings me back to those days where my biggest care was whether the history teacher would get too angry because my paper on the Russian Revolution of 1917-1918 was too long (64 pages bitches!). It draws me back to those little details of not having coin-operated washing machines for laundry, sneaking off campus at ridiculous hours to eat saimin at Liliha bakery then walking back goddamn exhausted because it was uphill all the way back. Then falling asleep in history class the next day. Overall though the one thing that I remember about this, there was a day in my senior year, Honors English with Powers, we were reading a book…and I can’t remember the book.... then discussing the book in class. But the discussions were like three chapters behind the reading. And I was annoyed. Why am I doing this reading if we’re not going to be discussing it until the next week? I didn’t make sense. And one morning I had this song playing as I was getting ready and there’s a line in the song “Lenny Bruce was not afraid…” So off I go to class. Again our class discussion is way behind on the reading. Power’s says something to the effect of “and what would this character ask?” As the song is playing in my head, “Lenny Bruce was not afraid…” my immediate response was “he would ask why we’re reading so far ahead if we’re not going to discuss it for a week.” And she turned, gave me what was quite possibly the closest I’ve ever gotten to a “MOTHERFUCKER IF I WASN’T GOING TO GET ARRESTED I WOULD LEAP OVER THIS DESK AND STRANGLE YOU WITH MY BARE FUCKING HANDS! YOU LITTLE SHIT!” look in my life. Then she paused for a couple of seconds and responded “you know what, you’re right” went back and sat behind her desk and that was it. We sat in stunned silence until the bell rang. And so I killed one day of Honors English because of REM.

Jon Dee Graham – Twilight
I saw this man play live once. In some bar whose name I don’t remember. I think it started with an A. He walks in the front door looking like…I don’t know what. I guess I assumed at the time a customer or maybe a trucker or something. He walks up to the stage takes just a few seconds for a sound check and then starts in on what I have to say is one of the most amazing live performances I can imagine. This song in particular I remember because at the time I was drinking my first Arrogant Bastard beer, one of my new favorites, and was unsuccessfully flirting with the waitress. It wasn’t a life changing experience but it was something I’ll remember and in the future as I travel I have to remember to get off the beaten path sometime. Hidden gems are really hidden, they’re just not on the tourist route.

Animaniacs – Nations of the world
United States, Canada, Mexico, Panama, Haiti, Jamaica, Peru
Republic Dominican, Cuba Caribbean, Greenland, El Salvador too.
It was I think seventh grade. I had this on tape. And it took me weeks to memorize it. Oh my God but it was awesome. I could do the whole thing super fast, like a fucking hummingbird on crack. It was just incredible. Jesus I said tape…I’m old. I was so impressed with myself about this one though. You’ve never seen such a happy little nerd. Though at the time I wasn’t exactly little but that’s a separate issue. I don’t know if they still do reruns on the Cartoon Network or whatever but it was such a neat thing to see. And at the time I figured, oh this might be useful, maybe I like win a geography bee or something. Hell, some of the countries on that list don’t even exist anymore …I’m old. But you know those things that can flash you back to childhood memories? This is one of those things for me. I can remember getting busted in intermediate school for stuff, nearly stepping in someone’s shit (literally) in the hall on the way to the shower, all the crazy stuff that…had I just been sexually abused by a Catholic Priest as a kid, I might have traumatically blocked from my memory.