knock knock : who’s there?

iPhones have the option of selecting a specific text tone for each contact. Android users? Did you know this? You can’t do that. Given that a lot of people communicate more over text than speaking, you’d think this would be more widespread. I asked a Google Pixel rep when they’d be doing that, I mean, they basically invented Androids, so dudes, what the fuck? Apart from the ridiculously numerous places you have to search for every goddamn setting in Android, having no contact-specific alert tones was the thing that annoyed me most in my Android foray. There are things that can be said about Apple, but unless they implode, I’ll be buying their stupidly expensive devices for the rest of my life, based almost entirely on this texting thing.

Ministry: You Know What You Are

We all know the people who are into the music scene and like all the bands we’ve never heard of. I listened to some of the music some of these people told me about and came away convinced they only liked it because no one else did. Pre-hipsters, if you will. I mean, who would listen to that crap? And to make it worse, there was all this talk about what the music means. Like, objectively? I guess. I was reluctant to dive into any music discussion or share what I liked with those music snobs because I felt judged and maybe a little like I was in the wrong. I mean, they seemed so sure.

I’ll Wait

I missed Van Halen the first time around. I wanted to go, but had parental issues, or rather my mother had issues with my going. It wasn’t because it was Van Halen, but because it was Van Halen sans assigned seating, or because, you know, it cost money and I didn’t have any. It didn’t make a lot of difference to me, exactly, because I liked the music, but didn’t really know much of it beyond the one album I owned: Diver Down. I wasn’t what was then called ‘hip’ to anything in the music scene and I didn’t know Van Halen ruled the world. Long story short, I never got to see them when I should have, but in 2007 I saw them with their rightful front man, and I lost my mind.

Rock Star/Vampire Diaries

Everyone has idols from their youth. Rock stars could liberate our sense of self, if only for a couple of hours at a concert or for the hour we listened to an album. We could live through them, feel more alive than we did at school or bagging groceries or working in an office. They said and did things we would never do in real life, without the aid of excessive amounts of alcohol or pharmaceuticals, and they did it all the time. At least, the good ones did. The real rock stars threw TVs out of windows, snorted drugs off the backs of naked groupies, got arrested at the airport for having pot in their luggage, slept with models, and got photographed at the best clubs.

In vain, in vain, I tell you, we’re all the same…

When I was in elementary school my mother taught at the school I attended. When I was nine or ten, she moved to a new room with more cupboards in which she found stuff left over from previous students or teachers. One day, she found an album by a band I’d never heard of: Chilliwack. This was back in the day of bands naming themselves after towns (Boston, Chicago, Toronto) and this Canadian band named itself after a town in British Columbia. The album was called Breakdown in Paradise and maybe it was the pretty birds on the cover, but I loved it. I didn’t really listen to the radio, as I recall, and up to then I only had my mother’s records to listen to. This one was mine, and when you’re seven or eight years old, that’s everything.

Everybody wants some, I want some, too.

One night in junior high, I went to a sleep over at my friend Laura’s house. She gave me a record she had, one she didn’t want, and I remember her being kind of dismissive of the music. I remember being a little put out that she was giving me something she didn’t like, but it was free, so whatever, and it all worked out in the end. I wonder to this day where she got it. The album cover was red, with a white diagonal stripe, by a band called Van Halen, of whom I’d heard talk, but not enough to know anything about them. The album was called Diver Down, and while I had no idea, then, what it meant, I had an idea that it meant more than scuba.