5 posts tagged “qotd”
Franny and Zooey was my first (and most fundamental) existential crisis-inducing piece of literature. I still read it every couple of years for the peculiar altered state it puts me into.
I want a crystal ball for my birthday this year. And a pony. But mostly a crystal ball - the newfangled kind that tells me I'll be in Home Depot for two and a half hours, not 45 minutes. The kind that tells me it'll take six hours (not two) to build and stain that AV rack. The kind that clues me in to the horizontal stud in the wall before I spend a couple hours trying to route cable down through it.
'cause that was my weekend.
Music's a huge part of my life. I write it. I record it. I listen to it constantly. Sometimes I select albums or playlists to reflect my mood. Sometimes I use my selections to affect my mood...
...all of which is a long-winded way of rephrasing the old "but I can't pick just one !" complaint.
Top of the list is the Specials' cover of Pressure Drop . "Drop" is right...as in drop whatever I'm doing and skank around my living room with a big goofy smile.
Honorable mentions, in no particular order:
- Bad Brains, She's Calling You
- Soft Cell, Sex Dwarf
- Fischerspooner, Never Win
- The Primitives, Thru the Flowers
- Veruca Salt, Volcano Girls
- Indigo Swing, How Lucky Can One Guy Be? - this was the first dance at my wedding back in '98...sigh :)
- Rush, Spirit of Radio
- Tsar, The Teen Wizards
- Bouncing Souls, Punks in Vegas
- The Toasters, East Side Beat
- Louis Armstrong, It Don't Mean a Thing
My first album: The Smiths, "Hatful of Hollow". 1987, my junior year of high school. I wore out the tape; then I bought it again and wore out that tape; then I bought the CD; now I listen to the mp3s and it's still my favorite Smiths album.
What's the last thing I didn't change my mind about? I am flooded with experiences. They saturate me with new perspectives, new emotions, new data. As I swim my way through them, I make decisions: when should I have the windows replaced, and by whom? What model should I paint next? Should I participate in the Comet alpha? The totality of my experience informs these decisions.
As I continue to soak up life, the foundations of my decisions change. We're due for another storm, so the windows get delayed. I proxy a new model and I like it, so it gets pushed up the queue. I experience enlightenment and, Thoreau-like, go off to live in the woods without Internet. A decision is only true for the moment it is made.
That doesn't mean I make my decisions without regard for consequence - accountability is the flip side of fluidity. Some decisions have life-changing outcomes. Marriage, pregnancy, selling everything you own and starting over again in Australia...these are heavy-duty choices. Fundamentally, though, they're just like any other decision: based on experience and subject to reassessment.
