Dinner, dancing, wine & strawberries … except for the bit that was like the twilight zone i seem to be actually enjoying myself
Friends are neat.
by krisis
Personal
I often forget he exists in the same relative universe to mine, but occasionally i am reminded. We haven’t talked for a few months now, since work and Eagles playoff games got in the way of us seeing Lord of the Rings. Eventually he gave up on calling and i gave up on waiting. Nothing new to us, really.
On a quick break from audio samples going live i stole over to the phone to confirm the reservations for dinner tonight, and when i gave my name the voice on the other line exclaimed “The Pete [redacted]” to which i kindly replied that, no, i was the Peter [redacted] and that Pete happened to be my father. The voice gave a good natured chuckle and confirmed my reservations, asking afterwards if i’d be coming with The Pete.
“No, just the one of me.”
He assured me they’d be on high alert nonetheless.
I am reminded of my father in the strangest ways.
I have to walk down Walnut between forty-fourth and fortieth every day; there’s really no way around it. Anywhere that i need to go is on the other side of fortieth street – school, work, transportation, and people. The trip down those four blocks is inevitable, and it greets me on any day that i dare to venture off of forty-fourth street.
The sidewalk between forty-second and forty-third is all gray slate on one side, great rectangular slabs of it all puzzled out to make a proper sidewalk. At its edges it gives way to concrete curbs on one side and front steps on the other — the concrete looking brutish against the calmly worn surface of the slabs. There are several pieces of the slate near the middle of the block that have buckled and cracked … from the wear of the years, i supposed.
The other day i crossed forty-second street on the south side of Walnut to find myself trailing a slowly moving truck. It was a pickup, large enough to do proper battle with an SUV, red dusted with grime that had survived the last day’s rain. I found myself trailing it because it was rolling down the slate sidewalk ever so slowly, and i could almost hear the rain gray slabs groaning in protest. I would, too.
The truck came to a stop halfway down the block, and as the oblivious men in coveralls stepped down from the cab my eyes fell upon the massive tires of their gleaming metal beast, and how all of the cracked panels that usually caught my eye were positioned in close proximity to them. The passengers of the vehicle seemed familiar with the weathered house they approached, greeting the man on its steps. Apparently, it wasn’t unusual for them to park there.
I was about to rail against their disrespect of what probably constitutes a historic fixture on their block just because they were too lazy to park farther away and then carry what they needed, but then i remembered that we had driven the massive yellow U-Haul truck right up to the sad front lawn of Ross’s house in August and how we nearly knocked the traffic light down while backing out due to my imperfect navigational skills.
No respect, i thought, and kept on walking.
Hi. I love my sidebar links dearly, yes i do. I also love the various SurvivorBlog and PuppetMaster alum who i read regularly despite my lack of linky love to them. However, i definitely need a few alternate reads … either your own blog that you don’t think i visit very often, or super-quality sites that it seems like i’m missing (with few exceptions: if i’ve never linked them and they aren’t on the sidebar, i don’t read them). So, fire away!
Via Ernie, Via 37signals: Celine Dion’s new disc will not play in computer CD drives. I’ve been harping about this a lot recently, and there has been a similar amount of speculation in independent internet press on which overblown major-label artist would first allow themselves to play guinea pig to this particular corporate experiment. Ironically, Dion is one of the least relevant: music piracy is obviously most common on college campuses, but Celine is much more of an Adult Contemporary artist. It remains to be seen if labels are brave enough to similarly cripple a disc by Ms. Spears or even Metallica, as the ramifications on record sales alone are potentially horrifying — not to mention the nearly assured backlash by college-aged record buyers (and their potential to find an easy way around the protection).
Not to prematurely give birth to my aforementioned massive media essay, but record labels just don’t get the damned point. Students burns and rip discs because they aren’t realistically affordably. Record companies continue to raise prices to help maintain their profit margins, while they slash artist rosters at the same time. Maybe if brand new pop discs didn’t have an unbelievable list price of nineteen dollars they wouldn’t be so readily copied for under fifty cents. But, rather than assess their own corruption of the artistic process and of the artists’ own rights, the recording industry would rather point the finger at technology and punish buyers who listen to music at their computers. It isn’t the right way to solve things.
If any of this sounds totally ridiculous to you, then you need to boycott Celine Dion’s new disc as well as More Music from The Fast and the Furious , Universal’s first foray into infringing on our rights as record buyers. I’m sure songs from both of the cds already abound on internet retrieval services thanx to savvy buyers with a line-in function on their computers, so feel free to go and download them without any guilt; record companies have shown us that all they care about is the almighty dollar, so all we can (and should) do is withhold it from them.