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Happy Valentines all. A mix of songs about Hearts and Flowers for friends and valentines:

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Hope you all have a great Christmas! Here is a little mix of Christmas tunes for you to enjoy:

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A post every 6th months? Sure, that will work.

After one Chicago to Boston drive followed by another Jess and I are finally here, in Boston, with our cat and all of our stuff. The first drive we used to get our car to the east coast and find ourselves an apartment, and the second drive, two weeks later, was in a rental truck filled to the brim with all of our worldly possessions. I don’t know if it’s a good or bad thing that two people can fit everything they’ve accumulated over their lifetime into a 12×10 truck. It doesn’t sound like very much stuff in those terms, but it sure as hell felt like a lot when Lucas and I we’re carrying the boxes down the stairs from our 3rd story apartment. The drive in the truck took us just about 24 hours. During the last half we stopped at just about every single rest stop. We’d gotten ourselves stuck in this loop of stopping for coffee, then to pee, then for more coffee, then to pee again etc etc. There was one guy we kept seeing at each rest stop too, parked like us with the big trucks. He seemed to get himself in a similar pattern of stops, though when parked next to him we could clearly see him doing lines of coke.

There aren’t too many notable attractions on the drive between Chicago and Boston. It isn’t complicated either. You get on I-90 in Chicago and drive until you get to Boston. On both trips we really had to restrain ourselves from stopping at the RV and Motor Home Hall of Fame. I wanted more than anything to see the Eagle-5 from Spaceballs and Cousin Eddie’s RV from Christmas Vacation. But alas, we were crunched for time on both trips and knew that stopping for 8 or 10 hours to see all that this magical place had to offer was not in the schedule. Cleveland is one heck of a town also. It’s not every day that you drive past a river and get to say “See that river? That river caught on fire.. more than once!“. Jess was almost ready to change all our plans and just move us to Cleveland instead of Boston when we stumbled upon a radio station that only played hits of the 90’s. We’re not talkin those soft rock, adult contemporary hits of the 90’s - I mean Pearl Jam-Soundgarden-Ugly Kid Joe-Green Jello Big Bad Wolf hits of the 90’s.

Before I moved (or even the first year year in) if you’d told me that in Boston I’d be homesick for Chicago I would have.. well, you know what I’m getting at. I’m not sure if it helped or hurt the homesicky feeling, but on the second night after we moved Jess and I headed out to see Chicago favorite Jon Langford and the Waco Brothers at TTs. Jonny is one of those artist who always mills about the venue before and after his sets, talking and shooting the shit with anyone who comes up to him. I didn’t get a chance to say hi to him at this show, though Jess did when she bumped into him in the women’s bathroom. There was an opener, though we didn’t watch them. Jess and I just kinda sat down and took in the surreal feeling of being in Boston with a bunch of Chicago regulars kicking around the club. We got up to watch Chris Mills. He’s this bizarro American version of our Chicago via London friend Martin. They both have the exact same body, haircut and even similar faces. The Wacos went on next and as expected rocked the place. If you’ve heard the Live and Kickin at Schubas album that’s probably the best description I’m willing to give you. They came out for their encore and started right into covers with thier version of George Jones White Lighning, followed by a blistering cover of Cash’s Big River (personally, my favorite Cash tune) and ended with a tribute to Bo Diddly who had died that day. We left and hitched a cab home. The cab driver didn’t know how to get to our house, and really, neither did we but it was a pretty painless ride. We got home with our ears ringing, tired, sweaty and a little drunker that we had planned for a Monday night, but it seemed like a nice welcome to Boston, and way to say so long to Chicago.

Jess got the Twin Peaks Gold Box Edition as one of her Christmas presents, so recently we’ve been spending a bunch of time watching that. I’m lucky enough to have never actually seen any of the episodes. When the originally aired I remember my dad watching them, but I was still young enough that it was on right at my bedtime. In the following years I’ve just sort of seemed to miss out on people watching it on video, or it running in syndication.

We were taking with Paul about it the other night, and how everyone in Twin Peaks is really all about sitting around and drinking coffee and eating pie. Just about anytime, anywhere. They’ll even shirk their responsibility to have coffee and pie, or sit down and eat it with their arch-rivals. Seems like a pretty great place to live, I mean aside from all the adultery, insurance fraud, underground flesh trading and murder. Though personally I find Lucy’s doughnut lineup much more appetizing than even the freshest pie they mention. Do they eat anyhing else in Twin Peaks? I remember Agent Cooper getting eggs once, and a fish, but that guy was in the coffee so I guess that doesn’t count.

One of the funnier things that I cannot get out of my mind while watching is something Jess mentioned quite a few times since we saw the Mekons a few months back at the Old Town School. Almost straight away when Lu Edmonds came out onstage she said “it’s Bob!”. Now keep in mind I’d never seen Twin Peaks at this point, and y’know that was probably a good thing. Jess wasn’t at all terrified, but if I’d known then what I know now about Bob, I would have probably ran screaming from the auditorium. She’s right though. Lu is on hell of a musician, played on a ton of awesome albums — but damn does he look like Bob!

I just wrapped up a much needed week long vacation. I wish I could say that I got a lot of stuff done in that time, but most of it was spent bouncing from place to place over the city doing smallish type errands. A chance to relax and recharge my batteries was what I needed the most. Aside from having a dog bite me in the leg on North Avenue, it was a pretty uneventful week off.

Yup, last Saturday while Jess and I were on our way to lunch a dog tried to take me out. We were in Bucktown, where people tie their dogs up to poles then go into stores to buy things. We’re traveling down the sidewalk coming up on these two dogs tied up together on a bike rack. One is totally cool, nonchalant even but his pal, in hindsight was a clearly agitated collie variation. It’s ears were pinned back and it’s looking me straight in the eye. For a split second the thought to pet this little guy flashed through my mind, but an instant later I rationalized to myself, ‘Don’t do it, you don’t know this dog, plus he looks kinda shifty’. So I focused on my grumbing stomach and the restaurant we were headed to which was a few doors away and simply passed the dogs, giving them a little bit of room. As I passed them within a flash I heard a sharp snarl and without even knowing it I was both sliding my legs back away from the dog and bringing my fist down on top his head. It started and was over in probably less than a second. I was pretty fast but this dog was much faster. I took a few steps back and was sort of in a daze and blind with adrenaline.

Shortly, I started to collect myself and realized the the right leg of my jeans was torn wide open from just under the pocket, in a straight, gaping tear. My mind was a buzz with questions, and I still wasn’t even sure if my leg had holes in it when a man emerged from the store heading for the dogs. Jess was instantly asking him if the dogs are his, and when he acknowledged she started directing his attention at me, who was still checking to see if all my parts were attached, to which he replies “Well, he’s been abused”. He was referring to the dog, not me. With the first words out of the guys mouth you could instantly sense he was completely annoyed with the situation. Next thing I knew his young daughter came out of the store, stopped in the doorway and started flipping out over the fact the dog ripped my jeans. In response the man says to us, ‘Well, why don’t you give me your information so I can send you a check for your jeans or something“, with a kind of sigh. All the while he was fiddling with the leashes, not even looking me in the eye. I told him to forget it.

At that point I just wanted to get going. I had a huge hole in my pants, and second by second getting more agitated by both the guys tone, and the fact that: A) he left a dog that he clearly knew wasn’t properly socialized tied to a pole in the middle of a very busy street, filled with stores in the middle of the busiest shopping season of the year B) he obviously wasn’t going to do anything to correct the dog’s behavior. I told Jess I wanted to go home and started crossing the street. I checked out my leg more when we got to the car and it turned out the dog did get a little bit of me. My skin had a tooth sized black and blue indentation, that was scraped a little bit. Other than that the worst thing to happen to me was the ripped jeans.

We went home, met up with Caca, headed over to Fat Willy’s Rib Shack, and after that meal everything was alllll-right.