JamesAsh.com

I have a habit of letting little things bother me.  I can deal with a problem.  I have trouble dealing with a lot of problems.  When I was in college, we used to mess with this guy that liked to park his truck under our window.  We’d throw water at him or ketchup or anything else that was convenient.  One day, to get back at us, he released 200 crickets in our room.  The crickets hid all day long.  But at night, when I was drifting off to dream and the room got to just the right temperature…

CHIRP! CHIRP! CHIRP! CHIRP!

I flew out of bed to fight my enemy, the lowly cricket. I turned on the light and spotted him in the middle of the floor.  I quickly captured him and threw him out the window.  From there, it was rinse and repeat all night long.  Crickets chirping and me frantically trying to find them and rid my room of the nuisances.  Had it just been a solitary large insect, I could have dealt with it. Having to deal with hundreds of them was just too much for me to take.

A couple of days ago, I filled my gas tank.  Five miles down the road, I am idling rough.  It kept up here and there for a few days until my car stalled last night.  A few short minutes later, my check engine light came on.  Dread and mild profanities filled my mind as I think of 100 things that could be wrong with my car.  It had already been a rough shopping trip full of encounters with various stereotypes that I try to avoid.  I creep home, hoping and praying my car doesn’t die on the way before finally pulling into the safety of my carport.

I finally manage to get my car to the mechanic after lunch for them to take a look at.  It’s just a busted hose – an expensive one – but a busted hose, nonetheless.  All of the other problems that I had been facing were minor as well and mostly resolved themselves over the course of the day.

Meanwhile, my daughter’s godmother was giving birth to her second child – a little girl with a head of hair named Emory.  But Emory, as they found out in the prenatal tests has a hole in her heart and she doesn’t have a pulmonary artery.  They are going to have to fly across the country for her to have surgery on their newborn.  Then, as their baby grows, they will have to keep having surgeries to continue to replace the piece that they have to put in her heart.  I can’t imagine what they are going through – the joy of having your newborn that is quickly replaced with worry as she is wheeled away to the NICU.  I’m hopefully that things will all work out. That Emory will get to open presents next Christmas.  And the Christmas after that. And walk. And say “Ma-ma.” And go to school.  And write her name. And so on and so on.  It’s all you ever want for kids, be it your own or those of the ones you care about.

We all have problems, worries, troubles, and concerns, but if we look around, there is always someone going through something that makes our pale in comparison.  To those of you facing real battles in your life, keep your head up and keep fighting the good fight one day at a time.  Your strength inspires the rest of us more than you could ever imagine.  Thank you.

Yes, it’s January 2 and I already broke my “resolution.”  I put that in quotes because I didn’t really resolve to do anything, yet I feel like I failed.  Let’s back up for a second.  My wife has a blog. It was supposed to be OUR blog, but it became hers somehow.  That’s fine.  I posted on there less frequently than I do here.  You just need to go over the timeline to see how often that is.  Anyway, she found something on some mommy blog network about committing to make one post a day for 365 days. She think she can do it.  And I decided, “You know what? So can I!” Well, apparently, I can’t because I didn’t post on January 1.  I’d like to say that it was because I was too hungover to write yesterday, but that’s not even a little bit true.

So, I commit now to blog everyday for the rest of the year.  No, I don’t like how that sentence looks.  We both know that isn’t true, even though I can post from my iPhone.  I have no excuse.  So I can’t promise to blog every day.  I know, I will always blog tomorrow.  That sounds good. TOMORROW! The sun will come up tomorrow and I will be blogging.  That should cover it.  Like I always tell the kids, tomorrow never gets here.  Isn’t that the procrastinator’s creed or something?

What I do promise is that I will post about all kinds of stuff this year.  Food, music, TV, movies, concerts, video games I play, work, lame people, pointless rants, sports, reality shows, annoyances, Twitter, technology, posers, pretentious people, nerds, dorks, bling, cars, football, kids, etc.  I will cover those topics and more.  Sometimes the posts will be good; other times funny. Sometimes they might suck.  But I will try to give you something you can enjoy… tomorrow.

In my quest to trim down my iPhone playlist, here are more songs I can’t live without.

Dr. Dre feat. Eminem “Forgot About Dre”
“Y’all know me, still the same ol’ G.”  Dre kicks off a great song from a great album.  I used to listen to gangster rap in high school at night on an AM radio station because there wasn’t an FM station in the area that played it.  I’ve always loved rap music, specifically in the beginnings because it was raw and about survival, not about flossing.

Forgot about Dre came about much later.  Rap was mainstream and Dr. Dre was the top producer in the game.  His solo album, The Chronic 2001, was great.  By now, he had discovered Eminem, who was absolutely killing it.  The Eminem verse is what makes this song a keeper.  Dre is great, but Eminem is on fire.

Forgot how great it is?  Check it out on Youtube.

Reel Big Fish “Sell Out”
This is one of the first ska songs I ever heard and I’ve been a RBF fan since.  It’s a satirical song about finally realizing the dream of having a record deal and how you’ve made it now.  No more flipping burgers.  But it’s also a look at how the music business is a scam and how kids are puppets in the game.  I find it interesting that there were two breakout ska hits in 1997:  The Impression That I Get by The Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Sell Out by Reel Big Fish.  The Bosstones are still played today, but this ditty seems to have faded into obscurity.

Read the previous post if you don’t know the back story on this post.

Third Eye Blind “Motorcycle Drive By”
This track is hidden deep on the band’s first CD, but is one of the favorites on 3eB fans everywhere at live shows.  It’s about a boy and a girl and they are friends, but I am pretty sure that he’s secretly in love with her, almost obsessed.  Anyway, he sees her one last time in New York and then goes home and dies.  I love it because it starts off with just a guy and a guitar and builds into this full band explosion before settling into this calm, peaceful ending.

Brand New “Jesus Christ”
Just a song from an emo band talking to the Messiah.  It comes across deeply personal and definitely something that I have always related to as a Christian – that we are undeserving of salvation.  From lines like “my bright is too slight to hold back all my dark” to “I’m not scared to die, but I’m a little bit scared of what comes after,” the song is well crafted and is deeply emotional.  I saw Brand New last year at the 2009 Voodoo Music Experience and they performed this song live.  It was tremendous.  This also isn’t the last time that they will make an appearance on this list.

Brand New – Jesus Christ (official video) from Lindsay Thomson on Vimeo.

If you read my posts, you will know that I love music. I recently upgraded my iPhone because my other one was too full with music. I’m going to have to pare down the list of music. Maybe if I write about these songs, I’ll figure out what should stay and what should go.

Sister Hazel “All For You” – When I was in college, I worked at the radio station. I discovered much of my music there by reviewing CDs. For the uninitiated, radio stations would get in dozens and dozens of CDs each week. They all had to be listened to so that you could find out what was good and what sucked. The first album that I reviewed was Sister Hazel’s Somewhere More Familiar. Let’s just say that I found it amazing. All For You was the first single and the song that most people know when they remember the band. Sister Hazel is still putting out great music.

The Nixons “Baton Rouge” – The distorted guitar starts it off and the line “somewhere between Baton Rouge and New Orleans” resonates with me because that encompasses where I spend a lot of my time. Other than that, the song really has NOTHING to do with Baton Rouge. But it’s good and you should have it.

Lost is not a show that I watch.  I’ve never seen a single episode and I’ve never wanted to.  Yet, Sunday night, I found myself wondering how it all ended.  Mainly, I just wanted to know if it was all real or imagined.  Did everyone get to go home?  Did a tsunami come and wipe them off the island?  Stuff like that.  I’ve read 3 recaps and one thing is clear: no one knows what happened.  Oh sure, everyone saw your boy laying on the bamboo but no one knows what it means.

Why would you waste six years of your life on a show that doesn’t pay off?  Isn’t this what Sopranos fans complained about with the fade to black?  We get subjected to crap like The Biggest Loser and Minute To Win It because people don’t watch the traditional shows that cost a lot more to produce.  And why would you?  You make the commitment to a show and then it doesn’t resolve anything, either because it gets canceled or because the writers make some ambiguous ending.  It’s ridiculous.