1. Ever since high school, when I looked up to the guys who were seniors when I was a sophomore and who seemed to go to all the cool concerts in Spokane and to know what LPs were cool at any given time, I have wanted to have cool taste in music. This desire continued through college and graduate school and into my days teaching at LCC as I listened to others who talked much more knowledgeably than I ever could about jazz and rock and roll and folk music and Bach and the Grateful Dead and sometimes I tried to sound smart and recite some catalog of Richard Thompson albums -- or whatever --, but I really never was that sophisticated in my knowledge or cool in my taste when it comes to music. This has been on my mind for quite a while and so I made taste in music the subject of our latest Sibling Assignment and tried to come to peace with how I enjoy so much music, but I'm not much of a music critic. If you'd like to read my piece entitled "Go Your Own Way", it's right here.
2. This afternoon, while I was writing about my much more Dionysian than Apollonian relationship with music, I took note that my coffee mug had a small amount of coffee and half and half lying cold in the bottom and I thought it would be a fun and Dionysian thing to do to pour some brandy over that coffee and sip on it while I composed my blog post. I was right. It was fun and tasty and and Dionysus paid me a visit in the form of a light and pleasant buzz.
3. The Deke and I ate a splendid dinner at the Diazes and when we arrived back to our apartment home, I broke the brandy back out and decided to get out the tablet, put in the ear buds, and go on a YouTube tour of the music I'd been thinking and writing about earlier and dive into the feelings and goosebumps of music that just gets to me. I began with Fleetwood Mac and then turned to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and The Cars and Pink Floyd and Harry Nilsson and REM with Eddie Vedder because a few minutes earlier I had watched Eddie Vedder join the Hearbreakers and I also enjoyed Stevie Nix joining the Heartbreakers and I reveled in Mike Campbell's transporting guitar solo to close out "Runnin' Down a Dream" at what I came to understand was a video recording of a 30 year anniversary Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers show. I also listened to "You Wreck Me" and when I went to bed I thought back to dances in the Kellogg High School cafeteria and at the Northwest Metal Workers Hall in Kellogg and all through the night I smiled and in my mind replayed Tom Petty singing his immortal couplet: "I'll be the boy in the corduroy pants/You be the girl at the high school dance".
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