Gimme Shelter

I'm downloading the new Weezer song off of iTunes right now, with "Teach Your Children" by Crosby, Stills & Nash in the queue, mainly because I can't seem to find my copy of the new Billy Idol CD, which I desperately want to listen to, but I fear that it's out in my truck, all of fifty feet away, outside in the fifty-five degree heat of an Illinois spring. It's also two in the morning, and I'm simply not going to go outside at this hour. It's balmy outside, the sort of climate-controlled environment you'd expect lab technicians to culture massive amounts of life-threatening bacteria in. Which is to say that I think it's downright anthraxy outside right now.

The Weezer song has concluded its downloading. "Beverly Hills" isn't much of a song. Maybe it'll grow on me, but it's certainly not as catchy or fun as "Keep Fishin'," which is -for my money- probably the catchiest song of all time. Yeah, that was the one with the video with the Muppets. Suddenly I notice that Glen Phillips (of Toad the Wet Sprocket fame) has a new song out, so I add that to the queue, which takes five minutes because of my stupid dialup connection.

On a side-note, I should add that I just barely missed seeing Glen Phillips play in Chicago several months ago at some small venue or another. A couple of weeks ago, I was informed by one of my friends that who was playing bass for Glen Phillips but John Paul Jones. If it wasn't bad enough several months ago, it was now much, much worse, having missed not only Glen Phillips in concert, but also the bass player for Led Zeppelin.

Back to bitching about dialup, with any luck this will be the last time I have to do it, because I'm informed that a cable modem will be installed sometime tomorrow, which means a trip out to ... someplace that sells 802.11G wireless setups. After that, it's a matter of praying to god that it works, then locking down the system so that others can't access it while wardriving, let alone gain access to my collection of pornography, which is quite staggering in size considering I've been living on dialup all these years.

I like the Live-Aid version of "Teach Your Children" better. Damn. I consider for a moment downloading "I Don't Like Mondays" by the Boomtown Rats, but I'm almost positive that I'd like the Live-Aid version of that better, too, and so maybe I should teach myself how to rip DVD's again, seeing how I've got the software lying around on my computer somewhere.

Trying to think of what movie to watch tonight, and I can't come up with anything. There's a ton of movies sitting on and around my desk, around because I've run out of desk space and they have a tendency to fall, and it was going to be Fight Club, but then I thought that was entirely too reactionary, given that I got shut down yesterday by the girl from my class and then again tonight by the Bozo Bucket ex-girlfriend, though she did so in passing, as though it were a standard part of every conversation she and I have. I consider for a moment Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but then I realize, what does that say about me? That I'm watching a movie that's essentially about a couple's attempts to erase each other from their memories, which makes it even worse. That's right, even if I wasn't writing this, I'd still be concerned about what others think of my DVD-watching habits. "I've watched three discs of Evangelion today, does that mean that someone might think I'm obsessed with anime and try to strike up a conversation with me about La Blue Girl? God, I hope not."

With my thumb, I scrape a layer of dust off of Rocky and think to myself that the layer of dust is probably there for a reason, and that I don't want to watch the movie so often that it loses its appeal. Dances With Wolves is always tempting, but then I have to switch discs halfway through, and I probably will have fallen asleep by then. That's the whole point of this, to put in a movie that I'll fall asleep watching, and it's as I type this that I realize that no movie in this world makes me fall asleep faster than Alien: Resurrection, which reminds me that one of these days I'm going to have to get the Alien Quadrilogy box set. I can do this because the extra money that I was budgeting just in case I was going to go out on dates with a certain girl is now recycled back into my entertainment budget.

I break out my now-underwhelming Alien Legacy box set, furious at Fox for double-dipping me on a box set. Okay, individual movies I can handle, but making me buy a whole new box set is simply unacceptable, and then I realize that I really want some of the ancillary materials from the Matrix box set, but not the movies. Lord, no, not the movies. I put the DVD into my DVD-ROM drive just as Glen Phillips's ... Phillips', Phillips's? I wonder what's proper in that case, and I know that the Bozo Bucket ex-girlfriend knows, but I'm not talking to her because I'm fantastically single and she calls me because she has nothing else to do on her hour-long commute home but talk about James Spader and how she wouldn't ever date me again.

But I digress. Glen's (yes, I know him that well now) song finishes downloading, and I realize that it sounds like Toad the Wet Sprocket, but not one of the songs off of Pale or Fear, which are really the only two Toad albums worth listening to, and Pale is only worth listening to selectively. Dulcinea is all right, and it's more like what this new song sounds like, but that album also has "Fall Down" on it, which was the only genuinely good song off of that whole album, which goes to say how much I'm liking this new song, and I wonder how it is that Paul Westerberg stayed good after the Replacements broke up, but Glen Phillips sucks in the post-Toad the Wet Sprocket world.

So that's three Pepsi bottle caps gone that I wish I could have back, and I think that I would have been just as well off if I would have gone and picked something off of that newly-added album by Chingy. Who the fuck is Chingy? I don't know, but I'm really fucking disappointed in Glen Phillips right now.

I considered yesterday getting the new Bruce Springsteen track, and it started out sounding like Bruce recorded the song with just him and an acoustic guitar in a run-down hotel somewhere off of the interstate (read: it sounded like Nebraska), and then came the string section and various other things that made me go, "Aw, why did Brendan O'Brien have to come in and fuck up another Springsteen album?" But I know that I'm going to buy the album anyway, and I'll say, "Wow, these songs sure are powerful, but goddamn I just don't like it," and then I'll start listening to Tunnel of Love, and I'll feel better. Or worse, but I'll like the music better.


AIM: therbmcc71