Entry 802: King Of Pain

I learned something about myself recently, something that has been true for a long time, but I just never realized it: I'm a Sting fan. Like a legit, sing-along-with-all-his-songs admirer.* I've long had what I thought was a casual fondness for Sting. Somewhere in my basement I have a CD box set of The Police and his solo album Ten Summoner's Tales, but both of those were given to me as gifts. I never would have thought myself a full-fledged fan of Sting's music, and I found his affect--the falsetto, the tantric woo, the constant feuding with his ex-bandmates--more than a little pretentious. But recently I've had my mind opened--opened like that book by Nabokov--and I've come to the conclusion that when it comes to the toe-headed Brit né Gordon Sumner, just about everything he does is magic.

*Well, not all his songs, but most of them. Well, most them before, like, 1995. I must admit, I'm not at all familiar with his later catalog. I mean, he did an album with Shaggy?

It was an episode of the podcast Hit Parade that really elicited my Sting love. I've been catching up on past episodes, and I also listened to one about David Bowie recently, and if you asked me beforehand whose music I like more, I would have said Bowie's without question. But after listening to these episodes, I realized that it's actually Sting I like more and by a nontrivial margin. Bowie has some amazing songs, but actually not all that many, in my opinion. By contrast, listening to Sting's episode, I was like, Oh, yeah, that song is a banger, and that one, and that one... I mean check out this list:

The Police 

• "Next to You"
• "So Lonely"
• "Can't Stand Losing You"
• "The Bed's Too Big Without You"
• "Message in a Bottle"
• "Walking on the Moon"
• "On Any Other Day" (Great deep cut)
• "Don't Stand So Close to Me"
• "Driven to Tears"
• "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da"
• "Spirits in the Material World"
• "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic"
• "Invisible Sun"
• "Re-Humanise Yourself"
• "Secret Journey" 
• "Synchronicity I"
• "Walking in Your Footsteps" 
• "Synchronicity II"
• "King of Pain" (bonus points for inspiring "Weird Al"'s "King of Suede")
• "Wrapped Around Your Finger" 

Solo 

• "If You Love Somebody Set Them Free"
• "Englishman In New York" (sneaky good) 
• "It's Probably Me"
• "Desert Rose"

That's like 25 bops right there, most of them with The Police, but a few solo tracks as well. He also provides back up vocals on "Money For Nothing" (total guilty pleasure song for me), and his song "Shape of My Heart," which I don't love (it's fine), is the backbone for Juice WRLD's "Lucid Dreams," which Lil' S2 and his friend used to ask me to play in the car all the time.

You might have noticed that I did not include either "Roxanne" or "Every Breath You Take" in the list above. I've never really liked the former, and the latter is a tremendous song, an absolute tour de force, that has been almost completely ruined for me because it's been so overplayed. It is, perhaps literally, the most played song in radio history. Like, if I had never heard "Every Breath You Take," and I listened to it for the first time, I would probably be thinking, Wow, this is absolutely amazing! (The Puffy remix is awesome too, if you can separate the artist from the art.) But I've now heard it so many times, it's hard for me to enjoy it. A few other songs that reached this level for me: "Stairway to Heaven," "Losing My Religion," "Longview," "Gangnam Style," "Old Town Road."

In the Hit Parade episode about Sting, one thing that host Chris Molanphy mentions is that Sting was a musical chameleon, who always seemed to find the right style to chart a hit--punk when punk was the thing in the early '70s, reggae when that was hot in the late '70s, synth-heavy in the '80s, ballad-y in the early '90s, and he even dipped his toe into hip-hop and country in the late '90s. This was often used as a knock against him, like he's phony or something, but really what's wrong with it? What's wrong with wanting to make the type of music that's popular at the time?

Maybe I'm just sensitive to this charge because I always felt like I was a chameleon coming of age at a time when authenticity was of the utmost importance and being a poseur was an insult of the highest degree.

Anyway, gotta run. Until next time... Zenyatta Mondatta.       

Entry 801: Fine Con

Almost no time to blog this weekend. The past three days have been action packed. Friday immediately after work I had to take Lil' S2 to baseball practice, and then I kinda crashed out from a long work week. Then Lil' S2 had a baseball game Saturday afternoon and then we had drinks with friends after that and then we had a St. Patrick's Day party after that. Today, Sunday, we spent almost the entire day at Awesome Con, which I would characterize more as Fine Con. Truth be told, I didn't find it awesome, but it's not really for people like me. It's a lot of anime/comic book/fantasy stuff, and that's not the type of nerd I am. If it was about, say, sports or crossword puzzles, then its status would have been elevated to awesome for sure. Actually, the vibe reminded me a lot of going to Cooperstown for Ken Griffey Jr.'s Hall of Fame Induction, even though the focuses of the two events were very different.

The main thing for the day was getting Lil' S2 a selfie with Nathan Fillion. I stood in line mostly by myself for two hours to do this, even though I didn't know who this guy was until like a week ago. Actually, I did, but I just didn't know that I knew him. Upon looking him up, I recognized him as the guy who played Green Lantern in the new Superman movie. He apparently was on a show called Firefly, which I've never seen, but I know is very popular in nerd culture, and so he and many of his costars from the show were signing autographs and taking selfies at this event. Lil' S2 knows him from this show The Rookie that he randomly watched the entire series of, so once he found out he was going to be at Awesome Con, he wanted a selfie.

Of course, Mr. Fillion so happened to be the most popular celebrity there (at least today), so his line was super long, and I, being the one who cared the least about actually seeing the exhibits, volunteered to wait in it. I got there at 12:45p, and we finally got the selfie at 2:45p. It was a legit two hours. I did most of it alone, and another dad took Lil' S2 and a few friends around to spend whatever money they had on swords and figurines and Monkey D. Luffy hats. (S had the big kids, Lil' S1 and his buddies, who just insisted they didn't need a chaperone, until she final relented and got a coffee and sat in the food court.) The wait would have been much longer too, at least another hour, probably even longer still, but this guy randomly came up to the other dad I was with and gave him a VIP pass that let us all skip the line. He said somebody did it for him once and he vowed to pay it forward one day, and we just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

The selfie, or selfies rather, we got a few, came out pretty good too. I'm not in any of them, by choice. There's something weird to me about paying somebody to be in a picture with them. It's fine for children, but it just doesn't seem like something becoming of a grown man. Like, if you know a celebrity personally, or you do something with them and get a picture with them, then that's cool. But it's much less cool to pay somebody to pose with you like they're your friend--to me, anyway. If that's your thing, like it is for the very chatty woman standing in line behind me, who was showing everybody around her all the photos she had with various celebrities, then more power to you. It's just not for me is all. Although, I say that, but the chick from Homeland was there also, and I did briefly think that it would be very cool to get a selfie with her, so maybe I have a double-standard about the whole thing. Well, I'm not alone. I overheard a conversation in which a woman somebody said to the effect of "The only selfie I've ever gotten was with Thomas Jane, because he's just really good looking."

Alright, that's all for tonight. Until next time... 

Entry 800: I Don't Want To Talk About It

We are still bombing Iran, and it still doesn't make sense to me. I don't understand how destabilizing an entire region of the world makes us safer in the long run. Violence begets violence begets violence. At some point somebody has to break the loop. I know two Iranian-Americans pretty well. One of them I haven't talked to in a few months. I asked the other one the other day how she was doing, and she said, "It's horrifying. I don't want to talk about it." Maybe that's the best approach for now. I don't want to talk about it.

I spent a large portion of this weekend doing dishes and cleaning the kitchen and there is more awaiting me right now. Lil' S1 loves to bake and cook, but it's like a cyclone comes through our kitchen every time he does. He uses seemingly every utensil in the drawer, every bowl in the cabinet, and every ingredient in the pantry. And I'm somehow always on the hook for cleanup. Actually, I kinda volunteer for it. I would rather do it than have somebody else do it. For one thing, I'm the only one in this house who can do an adequate job. S loads the dishwasher so inefficiently it drives me mad (and it often takes multiple runs or a post-scrub to actually get the dishes clean), and when the kids "clean up," I find dough all over the cabinet handles, a trail of flour on the floor, oil spatterings everywhere, etc. For another thing, this is one of the few things Lil' S1 likes to do that doesn't involve a screen, so I want to encourage it, and forcing him to clean up--really clean up--would be doing the exact opposite.

It's so funny how different my sons are with their friends. Lil' S1 had his D&D buddies come over yesterday, and it turned into an impromptu sleepover, and Lil' S1 made a pecan pie for the occasion (which was delicious, by the way; it wasn't cloyingly sweet, like most pecan pies I've had) with homemade whipped cream. Then this morning, he made everybody eggs and chocolate chip waffles with fresh cut strawberries and blueberries, and he fixed them all sandwiches for a hike they are on right now. Lil' S2 would never do anything like any of this. It wouldn't even occur to him. When he has sleepovers, fixing breakfast for him and his friends consists asking S or I to make them something, or getting bowls of Honey Nut Cheerios from a bag that has been mutilated open, so when you pour from it Cheerios scatter every which way. So, I guess the mess is one thing they have in common.

I doubt Lil' S2 and his friends would ever go on a hike together either, unless their parents were going and dragged them along. They are all actually skiing right now. It's one of his pal's birthday, so this kid's parents took a little crew to the mountain. They all went a few weeks ago for a class trip. It was Lil' S2's first time, and he said he really liked it. So, it's good that he gets to go again, as it's unlikely that S or I will take him much (at all) in the future. Neither of us know how to ski, and I'm not particularly inclined to learn pushing 50, and I don't think S is either. She did say, however, that she would go up and sit in the lodge if he wants to go sometime.

It's kinda strange that I never learned to ski being that I grew up near the Cascade Mountains and some pretty good recreational ski resorts (from what I hear). I just was never really into the outdoorsy sports--skiing, kayaking, rock climbing, etc. My parents weren't into this stuff,* so I didn't do it when I was little, and then when I got old enough to go on my own or with just my friends, I was too preoccupied with other activities. Wrestling was the big one. It was the same season as ski season, and my weekends were frequently spent at tournaments. You couldn't really do both. In fact, I remember one of my teammates lamenting the fact that his parents sold his skis, because he wasn't using them frequently enough to justify keeping them because of wrestling.

*My dad did cross-country skiing a bit later in life, and he took me once when I was in my early twenties. I liked it, but I didn't like it any more than trail running or hiking, both of which require so much less time and gear. 

Another, very petty reason I didn't get into outdoorsy sports as an older teenager is because I didn't like the culture. There was this group of kids who always wore Gor-tex and caps with bands around them and used carabiners on their school backpacks, and even though I was friends with a lot of them, I found the whole thing over the top and pretentious in a way. In retrospect, it was just young people finding their niche and expressing themselves, the same thing I, and everybody else my age, was doing, but at the time I found it to be something mockable.

There was also surely some sour grapes mixed into the batter, as the type of girl I went to college with was much more likely to be into the outdoorsy guy than she was to me. I remember once hanging out with some folks, and we were talking about our best New Year's Eves, and one of my North Face-clad buddies said, "When I was rock climbing [some surely awesome rock face somewhere in Colorado or Utah]. I rang in the New Year all by myself, hundreds of feet in the air, hanging in a tent, looking at the stars light up the desert landscape." I couldn't have rolled my eyes any harder, and yet this dude consistently dated the hottest girls on our campus. 

Alright, the pile of dishes in the sink beckons. I can't put it off any longer.

Until next time...  

 

Entry 799: Forever Instability

So, I guess we are at war with Iran now... or not? Maybe this will sprawl into yet another forever war in the Middle East, or maybe the bombings are going to stop in a few days, and we will look back on this in two months and be like, "Remember when we killed the Ayatollah? That was wild, huh?" the way we are now with the capture of Nicolás Maduro. I could see it going either way, with the latter being the more preferable of the two, by far.

Whatever the case, it certainly adds to the already unsustainably high instability in not just that region, but the world at large, and that is not a good thing. I don't see how this advances American interests. Iran, under its current (former?) regime, poses a threat in spirit to the US (they definitely hate us and often wish death upon us), but they're on the other side of the globe, and by all reports they don't have the weaponry to reach us. Of course, they could develop such weaponry, which would be very bad for us, so I understand bombing their military infrastructure, but killing their top leaders and telling the Iranian people to overthrow the government is a whole other animal. How is this going to be different from the other three times we've tried and failed at this in the past 40 years?

To be clear, I'm not exactly an expert on the geopolitics of the Middle East, but neither, I think it's safe to say, is our president. And that's another reason I don't like this. I don't trust the manchild in the White House to put the interests of the American people first and foremost. He does things almost completely based on his own self-interest and his own warped perception of how he's perceived by the rest of the world. And I suspect/fear that that's what is going on here also. In his first term, he tore up Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, I suspect, not because he thought the terms were unfavorable to the US (I honestly don't think he could describe the terms), but because it was Obama's deal. If it was the exact same thing, but he got credit for it, he surely would have been touting how great it was.

So, then he tried to broker a different deal with Iran, and he got nowhere, because Iran's government is largely fueled by obstinacy and hostility toward the US. They would rather die than accept anything that makes them look subservient to the infidels (and for some of them that is exactly what happened). I imagine the president took this all very personally, because that's the only way he ever takes anything, and he lost his patience, and when a guy with the temperament and insecurities of a middle school bully has the backing of a very powerful army (and a Netanyahu in his ear), this is the result we're all gonna get. One of the few things I liked about our president is that he seemed to not be a warmonger. Now, even that minutely redeeming quality is gone. It's not great.

To end on a positive note, it is genuinely heartwarming to see all these Iranian citizens and expats, who have been oppressed and terrorized by the government for years, to celebrate their freedom, fleeting though it may be. It makes me look at everything I've written above, and think to myself, But who am I to say to these people, "No, actually this is a bad thing"? But then I think about what lies ahead and wonder will it actually be any better for them. I don't have great responses to any of this. It's almost as if life is full of unanswerable questions, impossible tradeoffs, and moral ambiguities. The only thing I know for sure is that I don't really know anything and neither does anybody else. I'm very Socratic that way.

Until next time...