Live Fast, Die Awesome!

Ever notice that when people are discussing their musical tastes, someone almost always reveals their psyche a little bit too deep by specifying what they don't listen to?  It's always the same.  Someone has to pipe up with "I listen to everything except for country and rap." It was until recently that I was able to put words to what they're actually saying, which has little to do with their taste in music at all.  "I'm not poor white trash.  Also, I'm a racist."

Saw Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds last night.  Wow.  But I won't trouble you with a show review because I can't-won't-don't write those, I'll save that for Scott Mervis at the Post-Gazette .   During "Red Right Hand" I thought of my annual Halloween playlist on Spotify. "Red Right Hand" always makes the playlist, along with anything from Misfits to Dead Man's Bones,  Alkaline Trio to Siouxsie & The Banshees, Oingo Boingo and Tiger Army, Roky Erickson, Slim Cessna's Auto Club, Ghost B.C. and so on and so forth.  From punk to indie to 80's pop and post-punk and back again.   The goal is usually "eerie" songs.  Sometimes though I can't help but insert fun, two minute tongue-in-cheek punk songs like The Lillingtons "War Of The Worlds" or The Aquabats "Fashion Zombies."  The Ramones "Pet Semetary" is a staple of this playlist.   At some point I open up the playlist for friends...

My friend Sara has been telling me for years that I should start a blog because she likes my writing style.  I kind of resisted because "I don't have a topic" which is sort of a cop-out.  More likely I resisted because all I could think of were those days during and just after high school where I had all manner of LiveJournals and DeadJournals (the early 00's mall-goth equivalent of LiveJournal), wherein I would share the monotonous details of my daily life and cryptic posts about personal drama.  Life was so hard, I thought. But again, writing is an exercise I've always enjoyed.  When I worked for A-F my old boss Jorge once told me something along the lines of "If you can write a coherent sentence that is spelled correctly, you'll end up going far."  It was advice I took to heart.  I remember taking that advice right to the papers I was writing in CCAC at the time and having a professor, who's name is now lost to me, telling me that she real...