Guess the Song: MLK Day

January 18th, 2010

Here we go again. The rules are pretty much the same (google = cheating) but it’s a little different. This isn’t as random as it was before. Matter of fact, you could say it’s not random at all and I picked these songs. There’s a theme here and if you figure out one or two, I’m sure you’ll see what it is. Post your guesses in the comments. Good luck!

1. Some of them want to use you
Some of them want to get used by you
Some of them want to abuse you
Some of them want to be abused
(Kristen M.)

2. Stopped into a church
I passed along the way
well, I got down on my knees
and I pretend to pray
(Kristen M.)

3. It’s out there
It’s out there
It’s out there
If you want me, I’ll be here

4. And now I tell you openly
You have my heart so don’t hurt me
You’re what I couldn’t find
A totally amazing mind
So understanding and so kind
You’re everything to me
(Kristen M.)

5. Light switch
Man switch
Film was broken only then
All the night
Fused tomorrow
Dancing with a distant friend

6. Lookin’ at a green sky
Sun like a red eye
Bright blue horses are the fortune she lives by
She’s tired and lonely
Scared and depressed
Her visions of one day go racing the next

7. I sit by and watch the river flow
I sit by and watch the traffic go
Imagine something of your very own
Something you can have and hold

8. Oh, thunder only happens when it’s raining
Players only love you when they’re playing
Say, women…they will come and they will go
When the rain washes you clean, you’ll know
(Kristen M.)

9. Brooklyn like a sea in the asphalt stalks
Push out dead air from a parking garage
Where you stand with the keys and your cool hat of silence
Where you grip her love like a driver’s liscense

10. And when the music plays
And when the words are
Touched with sorrow
When the music plays
I hear the sound
I had to follow

As always, thanks to Apropos of Something

John Music

Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love

January 18th, 2010

The scene: My room/office/room. The lights aren’t on because we rarely turn on the over head lights. I’ve got my headphones on and I’m listening to Groovera’s “Low Mercury” station. I read somewhere, I think it was on Lifehacker, that people tend to listen to downtempo music to get work done. I’m hoping it helps/inspires me to get through this because our blog, is no uncertain terms, is the suck when it comes to, well, being a blog. We rarely write in it. I really want that to change. So here I am with hopefully the beginning of what I hope to be more frequent posts.

It’s been an interesting/crazy/annoying couple of weeks for me. I’m going to bullet point these things so I hope that’s ok with you. If not… *shrugs*.

- Merry Christmas & Happy 2010.
Forget the year, where did the decade go? I’m not quite sure of it but it seems to me that the older I get, the faster time seems to be rolling by. My oldest will be 8 this year. My marriage will be 10. I remember a time when I didn’t have either. I also remember not ever being this happy with my life. Outside of the weight gain.

- Dave moves in

My brother Dave moved into our house. Happy to have him here. Our office is now, once again, in our bedroom. I miss the division of “work” and “home” spaces but knowing that Dave is here with me far outweighs that comfort. Although getting ready for him to be here was and (as you’ll see) continues to be painful.

- Ouch, I hurt my old
So, in order to get Dave here, we had to move a lot of stuff around. The desk in our office, which was just a long table that Carla and I shared, wouldn’t work in here so we now have two separate desks. This is a good thing because now we have our own spaces and we don’t harsh each other’s work flow. That is unless Carla’s trying to get my attention and I have my headphones on. We sit with our backs to one another so I don’t always see her trying to talk to me. She loves this. And by love I mean hate. We also had to move some furniture around to accommodate Dave’s sofa. So the sectional is now in the family room and the love seat is now in the living room with another love seat and Dave’s couch. None of which match the other. Stylish! All of this is my long winded way of saying I’ve been in pain since the morning of the 26th (did I mention we did all of the furniture moving on the night of the 25th? No? Well, I just did.) because I hurt my back moving all of that stuff. This wasn’t a normal hurt back though because I’ve had that before (I’ve moved lots of heavy things that in turn have hurt me, chief among them: my stomach) and this pain is different because it is only limited to my lower left back. This is not what normally happens to me. And the pain when it came/comes, shoots down my left leg. Bonus! Since it usually goes away after a few days, I didn’t think anything of it. Just dealt with it the only way I knew how: move slow, add heat, curse profusely when the pain comes. But it didn’t go away. That’s when I called the Doctor.

- Doctor Happy Pills
I’m staring out the window of the second floor room where I wait for my Doctor to come in and tell me that I need to lose weight. There’s a man made body of water outside. I notice that there’s a bunch of dead fish in there and I quietly wonder who’s job it is to take those out. The doc comes in, asks me what’s wrong, takes some notes when I tell him, gives me an order to go get some x-rays taken and prescription for some pain killers. While I am happy that at least something will help me take the pain away (the over-the-counter stuff — Advil, Motrin, Aleve — was just not doing it) I also wished that I would have had a better idea as to what was going on. As I leave, I notice a man standing next to the lake thing with a net cleaning out the ex-fish. Much like my appointment’s outcome, I guess I was hoping for something a little more elaborate. Fun fact: He never said I needed to lose weight. I later ate two snickers bars while drinking a soda. Doctor’s (non) orders!

- Underwear choice comes into play
After my doctor’s appointment, I pick up the prescriptions and head down to where I’m to get my x rays taken. It’s not too far from home so I take the surface streets. I hate looking for places when I’ve never been there before but I always like going in them (unless they look spooky). Side Note: I like going in these places because if I didn’t have to I probably wouldn’t ever. This feeds into my fascination with the fact that there’s probably millions of buildings that I will never enter in my lifetime but, for other people, these same buildings might be a large part of their lives. I know that I’m essentially saying that I’m amazed that there’s a whole world going on out there but what I’m trying to say is that it’s the size of it that boggles my mind. There’s a lot of people and a lot of buildings out there. A lot of worlds I’m *not* involved in. Fascinating. I’m probably not explaining it as well as I could but it’s late and I’ve already taken the muscle relaxer mentioned in the above bullet point. Whee! end note After some time my name is finally called and I’m taken to the dressing area by a female… nurse? Not sure what to call her. Technician? Anywho, we get to the male dressing area where she tells me “Those pants need to come off” (cue bow-chikka-bow-bow). This statement is then followed by “Keep your underwear on” and “You’ll need to put on this gown with the back open and if you don’t feel covered enough you can put on this second one.” (kill the music). It’s at this point that I remember I’m wearing my Big Dog Las Vegas print boxer shorts. I could have gone with a solid color but no, I chose Vegas and once again, Vegas finds a way to screw me. *sigh* Later, when I’m with the x ray tech, I’m asked to lay down on a table where I’m sure she catches a glimpse of my poorly chosen underthings but she’s too much of a professional to mention it.  Upon later reflection she may have just been glad that I had them on at all.

- Football sucks. Again.
Still a little painful to think about but, the Cards didn’t make it to the Super Bowl. Al Davis has yet to shuffle off this mortal coil so conversely, the Raiders were the suck this year — AGAIN. I was close in my fantasy draft but, once again, no cigar. Re: Fantasy — I wonder when I’m going to learn my lesson almost as much as I wonder how long until the next draft. It’s a sickness.

So what’s the takeaway from all this? I would have to say that it comes down to a few things.

1. If you have to move furniture, don’t. If that’s unavoidable, get help.

2. Doctors occasionally say helpful things. Sometimes they don’t.

3. Porn situations very rarely happen in life. Also: It seems there’s no situation (outside of a funeral) that couldn’t be helped with a little background bow-chikka-bow-bow.

That is all. Cue the music.

John Whatever

Springsteen cross country dreams

November 11th, 2009

liverpool

Welcome to a new feature here on The One Hundred: Phone calls with Jon. Self-explanatory, no?

Setup: I read online that Bruce Springsteen performed a few more of his albums in their entirety at some recent shows. The one that stuck out for me was “The River” which was the album Jon had chosen previously as the one he would like to see him perform. I felt this deserved a phone call.

Me: So I guess you weren’t at Madison Square Garden on Sunday.

Jon: Wh-what?

Me: Bruce had a concert. He did another one of his albums.

Jon: Was it “The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle”?

Me: Nope. It was–

Jon: The River.

Me: Yep. So I guess you weren’t there?

Jon: *sigh* No…

– some discussion regarding the merits of said album takes place here which leads to a startling admission –

Me: You know, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a whole Springsteen album all the way through.

Jon: *silence*

Me: I know, I know. You’re all “Why am I even talking to you?” Should I listen to that one? Would that be a good place to start?

Jon: It’s on Napster…

Me: I know and I think about it sometimes but then I’m like “nah”.

Jon: Don’t you remember when we were going to drive across country listening to Bruce the whole way?

Me: …um… no?

Jon: Maybe that was a dream.

Me: You know what we should do? We should drive across country but we don’t take any music and we only survive on the music found at the truck stops along the way. Although I think by the third stop we’d probably be ready to kill each other.

Jon: When we were coming back from Rio Vista we were driving down the 5 and we stopped at this little gas station in the middle of nowhere and you know what they had in there? Cassette tapes! And not only that but they had Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Liverpool”. On cassette! When did they stop making that? And it’s sitting there at this gas station –

Me: It was probably one of the original tapes from back then!

Jon: I mean who’s going to come to this little gas station off the 5 and buy this? Liverpool? It’s not even the good one!

Me: Did you buy it?

Jon: *pfft* No. … I already own it.

John Music, Phone calls with Jon

Random Thoughts

November 5th, 2009

random

*Blows some dust off the blog*

Huh. Still here. Cool.

*Blows more dust off*

Well, let’s get to it.

I don’t have a full post for you today (have to learn how to walk again before I can run), but here’s some random thoughts that I’ve chosen to post here instead of over on Twitter where I’ve been micro-blogging like a mad person (follow me, won’t you?) as 140 characters can only do so much.

The above image is the fifth image that came up in a Google image search on the word “Random”. The first four images?

Partially naked fellow jumping in mid air in front of a car.
Multicolored abstract image.
Static.
Chuck Norris.

Now you know.

I was walking around Target yesterday when I noticed that just about all of the Halloween stuff that was *just* there had been relegated to one aisle now. And Christmas was in the process of exploding all over the store. The Christmas music playing was soft enough to mildly enjoy but loud enough to not be ignored. In the instant that it all clicked – I became aware that I was torn. On one side I was elated and a little mushy (Christmas music does that to me) and on the other, I was *this* close to being horrified. I don’t think I’m quite ready for Christmas just yet — and that feels weird to me. I love it as a holiday and it definitely is something I look forward to, but I believe it has its time. I don’t want it quite so early. It just seems that we’re just barreling toward the end of a year that, to me, still feels like it just got here. “Don’t let the door hit you on your ass on the way out!”. That said, I’m looking forward to St. Noggington’s Day (more on that later) and repeated viewings of “A Christmas Story”.

I don’t know if I’m going to get this next part out in quite the way I want to. I’ve been doing a lot of searching lately. I don’t know what it is I’m looking for, so as you might have guessed, that makes the finding a bit harder. It just feels like I need to look for something — like something’s missing. I hope I find it.

I also hope it’s chocolate covered.

I’m at the beginnings of an Indian music kick. I blame this squarely on George Harrison and the movie “The Darjeeling Limited”. I should say that it’s not 100% traditional stuff — there’s clearly a western influence to the stuff I’m listening to. It’s indian in the sense of the vocals and musical instruments but there’s also a mix of electronica in there too. I dig it.

And, just because I like you, here’s a download link so you can journey with me — don’t worry, it’s free.

“Well, she shouldn’t outweigh me. I also want her to be normal looking — no mutants.”

This was my answer to the question that started our attempt at a mature conversation in my sex ed. class: “What are you looking for in mate?”

I said it out loud.

I was in 10th grade.

In retrospect, I’m really embarrassed that I said that but that moment is crystalline in my mind — so much so that I vividly remember saying it as I sat in the back row of the class, I remember Coach Cato’s (yes, we had a football coach teaching that class — public education FTW!) reply/aside of “This is a mature conversation?” as well as his too tight blue collared shirt, I remember feeling flush because my attempt at humor was not called for, recognized, or funny. I desperately wish that I could go back and stop me from saying it.

I have lots of regrets like this.

I don’t think they bothered or were even noticed by anyone else but I can’t seem to let go of them.

One word hints for future blog posts:

Evergreen, Superman, Mask, Jamz

John Whatever

Recycling: Children in Bloom Part II

July 29th, 2009

songwriting

Going back even further, I was able to find the page from John Sagredo’s journal from the actual day that we performed that song! Here we get to see what he was thinking at that exact moment in time.

Originally written: November 12, 1987

I did it! I don’t know how I talked them into it, but I did it! Going in I was thinking can-can or the bump? Can-can or the bump? I went with can-can and it felt…well, it felt right.

Look out world! John Sagredo is dancing and he – is – FIERCE!

Ed. Note: I do believe this was the first time “fierce” was used to describe something unbelivably gay.

Jon Edge of Memory