June 30

The year is half over. You measure time far more acutely as you age. You become so much more aware of its value and how it is fleeting. You just do not know how many more years, months, or days you have left and it is terrifying. It gets you both ways - you think a lot about the time you have squandered - almost FIFTY YEARS, while knowing you may have another thirty or forty or you may have two. Will you spend your golden years hale and hearty, or attached to an IV drip as cancer eats your insides? Will you live to see our nation become more just or will you drop dead while Donald Fucking Trump is President? Will you get to enjoy a retirement you are assiduously planning for or will some random driver speed through a red light and kill you? Andy said in Shakshank that you have to get busy living or get busy dying but what happens when you feel caught between?

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June 29

I just watched the first two episodes of Euphoria. It is ... a lot. The teen experience is well-mined ground, all the way back to Rebel Without A Cause but in the online-all-the-time world we live in, the blend of sex, drugs, and violence is disturbing (even though most research shows teens are doing less of the first two than prior generations). The lead actress, Zendaya, is excellent. To carry a show like this you have to have the balance of pathos, sympathy, and charisma that she possesses. She is a drug addict who can lie with a smile on her face, is manipulative, and makes a lot of really bad decisions, but you still root for her. 

The touchstones of online dating, porn, and text messaging are not so much blended into the story as the atmosphere. In an earlier time, throwing a party while your parents were out of town might result in some fuzzy memories and memorable stories, but now, it is captured, catalogued, and shared with the world in all its out-of-context unfairness and risk of shame and discovery. To be sure, some of the characters are cliched - the hyper-aggressive high school quarterback, the white-but-talks-black drug dealer, and every adult over the age of 40, who is invariably naive, clueless, or hiding deeply disturbing secrets (the father of one character is a serial philanderer, sexual dominant, and closeted bi-sexual - like I said, it's A LOT). 

I am absorbing it in all its insanity (and occasional inanity). Youth culture was the defining time in my life; I am here for seeing its progeny expressed in a raw, extreme, and challenging way. I think James Dean would approve.

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June 28

The Democrats just had two nights of debates. I admit, I got more sucked in than I expected to. The reality is that most of what happened will be forgotten by the weekend. The after-action reporting was predictable superficial, who "won" and who "lost" and the questions were equally bad. I keep having to remind myself that most of what we see on TV is not there to inform us, it is to entertain us in order to keep the advertising dollars flowing. It is not to say there is not some decent journalism being done, but it is too often buried underneath an avalanche of "analysis" that is really just random people giving opinions that you or I could share too. 

None of that bodes well for next year. It is clear that most reporters *still* have no idea how to handle Trump. My own view has been that if you ignore him, he goes away. If you stop focusing on his Twitter vomit, if you made him explain why it is that the government he leads has failed to cover the 30 million people without health insurance, or address gun violence, or invest more in STEM, he would be exposed for the dope he is, but instead, he just says stupid shit and reporters react to it. 

I have long believed (and data is starting to bear this out) that the American people may have passed a tipping point with him. Like a reality show, he got big "ratings" (attention) at first, but as the novelty has worn off, as he just keeps repeating the same antics over and over, the novelty has worn off, people are tuning him out. Of course, when this happened on the Apprentice, they made a CELEBRITY APPRENTICE to goose ratings, I guess a war or a fake trade "win" is what will replace that now that he's President. Someone who runs on attention can only be defeated if people become indifferent to him. 

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June 26

Tonight, I picked Ghost up to give him a scratch behind his ear and he started licking my arm. I get a little weepy. Cats are not like dogs, they do not typically express themselves and their affection for you like dogs do. You have to earn that affection and it means a great deal. I love him.

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June 25

Ghost was sick yesterday. Poor little guy. He did not want dinner and was acting weird (I did not appreciate how much parental intuition one gets). As it turned out, he barfed down in the basement (which I did not discover at first because I went to the gym after stopping at home after work) but then seemed a little better. It was stressful because P and G are so low maintenance, but by this morning he seemed ok - he ate all his breakfast and had some more water. I checked in with the vet last night and she told me to keep an eye on him and follow-up if things do not improve. I think it passed. Fingers crossed.

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June 23

One upshot of Pumpkin and Ghost's vet checkup was a stern lecture I received that both of my fur balls need to drop some weight. This is a problem mostly of my making, I feed them too much and cave easily if Ghost (it's ALWAYS GHOST) starts meowing over by where they get fed. I put food out and Pumpkin comes bounding in to steal the food Ghost has nudged me to give him, so then I end up feeding them both. The end result is Ghost is 15 pounds and Pumpkin is 13 pounds.

Since Tuesday (when we saw the vet) I have been trying to be better about only feeding them in the morning and at dinner time (around six p.m.) It's been mildly successful (easier to do during the week) but the weekends are tough and Ghost is not happy. I have a hard time saying no and he is persistent, but I am making an effort.

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Neil Young - Tuscaloosa

In a roughly five year period between 1968 and 1973, music poured out of Neil Young’s febrile mind almost faster than he could produce it. He released iconic solo albums like Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Harvest, and After the Gold Rush. He also added the “Y” to CSNY on the brilliant 1970 album Deja Vu. All of this would anticipate a career that was spent dipping in and out of musical genres, always charting his own course, zigging when others zagged.

Young has plumbed his extensive archive for the benefit of a fanbase that now stretches from early Baby Boomers to smart phone-addled millennials. His latest release is Tuscaloosa, recorded with the Stray Gators at the University of Alabama on February 5, 1973.

There is a shaggy dog quality to both the recording and the performance. Although this set was played in a large auditorium it has the feel of a honky tonk. The beginning tracks, which Young performed solo or with acoustic accompaniment by the Gators, have a looser feel than their studio-recorded siblings. Old Man and Heart of Gold mix some of the nascent California-influence of Linda Ronstadt with the Nashville sound Young mastered on his seminal work Harvest while Out on the Weekend has a languid, almost hallucinatory quality. 

The second half of the set is electric. Young shows his no-fucks-to-give attitude by pulling out a searing version of Alabama that hints at his later exploration of guitar feedback and grunge. Other tracks, like Time Fades Away and Don’t Be Denied move the country stomp of Hank Williams and Willie Nelson into electric guitars anchored in a solid backbone of bass and drum. 

Tuscaloosa is another data point indicating Young’s sui generis place in modern music. His interweaving of rock, country, and rhythm and blues is evident throughout this truncated set of music, a must have for fans of this one-of-a-kind musician. 

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June 21

I do not get Bobo. I get being a super fan. I paid money for a Sirius subscription solely because of the Stern Show (ok, it did not hurt that Sirius has a Grateful Dead channel too). When the show started at 6 a.m., I would time my lunch so I could pick up the West Coast feed around the time I got to work. I posted on Stern Fan Network. I get it.

What I do not get is why Bobo subjects himself to daily ridicule from the person he worships. He is mocked. He is made fun of. He is the punchline to jokes about everything from basic grammar to his low IQ. Is being the court jester worth a small dose of fame?

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June 20

The nice thing about getting older is never sleeping through the night. The past few nights have been similar - I am in bed and asleep between 9 pm and 10 pm and wake up sometime between 2 am and 3 am. Instead of falling back to sleep, my brain is able to immediately race through what feel like a hundred different things, from what I have to do at work tomorrow, to what home improvement projects I will need to do 10 years from now if I sell my house. It is really something. At best, I may drift off into a shallow slumber that does not last past 5 am or so because I have two hungry feline mouths to feed who can go from alert and attentive to deep slumber in the blink of an eye.

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June 18

Pumpkin and Ghost did SUCH A GOOD JOB with the vet today. It is stressful for me, but for them, it is a little inconvenience they quickly forgot about. Of course, I had to run the vacuum so Ghost would go down into the basement so I could then corral Pumpkin and get her upstairs and then, go back down to the basement and bring Ghost into one of the bathrooms, where he meowed his head off until the vet was done with him. 

Their check ups were fine, although Ghost is too chunky (my fault). He now weighs 15 pounds (up 1 pound from last year) while Pumpkin held steady at 13 pounds. I think it is more their lack of exercise, but I do feed them too much. Gotta work on that, but at least there won't be any drama for ONE WHOLE YEAR!

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