TEN RANDOM THOUGHTS #9

1. Considering that we’ve never determined who stole the kishka, or who threw the overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s chowder, I believe the question of who let the dogs out is bound to remain unsolved, unless somebody out there decides to become a novelty-song detective.
2. I sit here in the semi-chill of a Wisconsin winter looking at my poor knuckles, all dried out, red, and cracked, and then I remember that pretty much the instant the humidity comes back and they start healing, I’ll be starting that community-ed auto repair course I signed up for. Which, let’s face it, isn’t going to be very good for the knuckles.
3. Sometimes in the still of the night, I lie awake in bed haunted by a terrible thought, a dark, swirling, sinking miasma of despair, as I ponder anew whether I maybe am the only person in the world who hates deviled eggs.
4. But mostly I just lay there and think about how cool it would be to have an old Volvo 240. I might be a terminal case.
5. Culture changes so fast these days that, for those of us “of a certain age,” it’s getting hard to place previous events in time. I wanted to write, “Whatever happened to Ricky Martin?” because I thought it had been an eternity since he’d been in the public eye, but then I discovered that he was at his peak only a little over four years ago. If you’d asked me, I’d have placed him right around 1996–the height of the Macarena craze.
6. I have been paying almost no attention to world events since the holidays. In fact, I’ve been paying just as little attention to national events. Perhaps the one lingering effect of the 2004 elections (for me, at least), is that I’m actually tired of news. Not just bad news, and not just political news . . . I’m tired of news, period. Whether it comes from TV, newspapers (or, more likely, their websites), blogs . . . it just doesn’t matter. If you report the news, I now automatically assume you’re lying to me to further a political agenda. I think the only news source I trust anymore is AM radio. And I wonder if this is what it was like for Russians (Ukranians, Byelorussians, etc.) to read PRAVDA back in the old Soviet days.
7. I’m officially bored with Wilco. I still respect Jeff Tweedy tremendously and appreciate all the good times I’ve had listening to his music over the past decade, but man, I’m just not into to going where he’s going. Not that the new stuff isn’t great, and not that I won’t be buying it (eventually), but it just doesn’t connect with me.
8. I don’t get what Kanye West fans are so upset about. The only award more effective as a kiss of death than the Best New Artist Grammy is the Motor Trend Car of the Year. He should be thanking the Grammy people for sparing him from this career-ending blight.
9. Speaking of Grammys and Cars of the Year, if the singer in the Mercury commercials sounds familiar, that’s because she is–Paula Cole, 1998’s Best New Artist. From the Grammys to jingles in about six years.
10. Remember way back when, when I complained that they weren’t building the Arby’s by me fast enough? It’s been open about a month and I’ve been there exactly once.