Why I Oughtta

Hi everybody.

Man, I'm so tired that I think I could type for a while.

Lots to write about, for once.

I just got back yesterday from a quick trip to Ohio. Grandma's moving into a retirement community — not a nursing home, but one of those old people villages where you can walk to everything and they have manmade ponds with benches for you to sit by. Grandma's got some pretty sweet digs from the looks of it when we dropped by. She doesn't have the key yet because it's being rewallpapered, but my aunts, grandma, mom and I all went up and looked through the windows like we were casing the joint for a robbery.

But the reason we went to Ohio was because we had to load up a couch, a desk, a chair and some other stuff into a U-Haul and lug it back to VA. My grandma enlisted the help of her ex-neighbor to help us move the stuff. It's really weird. I met him at my grandpa's funeral. He and his wife are very classically all-American. He's a firefighter and I think she teaches or something. They've got two girls. They used to live across the street and apparently grew attached to my grandpa. Now, they leap at the opportunity to help my grandma out. However, there's this other guy named Edd ie Lee who gets competitive with him over helping my grandma out. So she's got these two duelling guys who can't be in the same room together because they're so devoted to my grandma that they'd have a knife fight over who gets to carry the wedgewood out to the U-Haul.

We went with the firefighter because we'd rather have a buff (seriously buff) 40 year old firefighter rather than a 70 year old with bad knees. In any case, firefighter and I got all of the stuff out of the house with surprisingly little trouble.

Mom and I flew out to Dayton from BWI. There was a bit of a commotion on the plane because, as we were preparing to take off, the flight attendant came on and said, “Hello passengers. Thank you for flying AirTran. My name is Betty (or whatever), and I'll be helping you along with Mary and Joseph.” My mom started chuckling at the biblical reference, saying that there was no way this plane was going down. However, there were these two black ladies behind us who were going out of their minds. They were laughing so hard that people started staring. And their laughter made my mom start laughing. Seriously, 5-10 minutes had gone by before they all regained something resembling composure.

Right now I'm kind of zoning out. I'll be better after tomorrow, though. I'm stressed out by this interview that I have to do tomorrow with this musician named Bob Mould. He was in a band in the 80s called Husker Du and a band in the 90s called Sugar. If you heard some of Sugar's stuff, you'd probably recognize it.

In positive writing news, though, I've been getting good feedback lately. My Blade editor said that my Enduring Love review was “really good,” my editor at the Express said (albeit quasi-ironically) that I was a “valuable asset,” and my boss said that my two stories this week (eminent domain follow-up and a story I dug up on tracking information on foster kids) were good. In fact she wrote “nice” and “nice work” on them respectively. So that should be good for the morale.

Should be.

In other news.

I've probably gone on this rant before, but it's really liberating to let yourself hate things. Like jazz, for instance. I guess I'm not smart or soulful enough to give a flying fuck about jazz. But I really think it's boring and so does Ekrobi. We talked about it Friday before I left. Safe space. Safe space to share. But I really do think it's nice to not have to pretend to like things. Like Shakespeare's comedies and the music of Guns n' Roses.

Tomorrow's to-do list: finish my Mould research so I don't look like an ass tomorrow (please tape recorder, don't break), research stuff to do in Hawaii and do advanced work for the issue that comes out August 8.

ALSO — Kathy Griffin is coming to DC August 5 and 6. I will be going and you fuckers better come if you are in town. I am missing Zach Galifianakis AND Maria Bamford in July, so this is a must-see.

Wow… I only have female friends.

Or it seems that way a lot of the time, at least.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just kind of a fact.

Found in a drawer in my Grandma's house. Written in huge, 1st grade letters.

——

Once upon a time a fairy came to visit me.

She did a beautiful dance.

I liked the dance that she did.

The fairy said to me, “Did you like the dance?”

I did.

Then she danceed [sic] some more.

The cover of the most recent Advocatemakes me want to cry. In a good way.

Here's another enjoyable track. It's by this dude named Sufjan Stevens, and he kind of sounds like Iron and Wine's slightly effeminate younger brother.

Pitchfork has a review of this track up today. As usual, it's unnecessarily verbose, but at least this reviewer doesn't spend the first half of the review talking about himself/nothing/metaphysics.

I've heard Mr. Stevens before in the coffeeshop, and it seems like most of his stuff is this mellow. He's working on a 50 states project (one album per state. So far, he's got Michigan and Illinois), but this is an extraneous song about Arkansas.

As an added bonus, he's kind of cute.

Here's the gossip-mongering…

The Moonbabies are a weird little Swedish band that's actually been around since 1996. Not that anyone's really noticed. But they've got a free track that's kind of sweet and poppy, called “War in Sound.” It's the title track of their new mini-album.

They're a male/female duo. She plays all the instruments that have keys. He does everything else. They both sing.

They're Swedish. Allow them the lame band name.

Heard the rumor that Rob Thomas was caught in bed with Tom Cruise? By his own wife, no less?

I'm surprisingly unaroused.