February Depression Posting!...and some Stones...and Rick Santorum...what a hoot.

PERFORMANCE ART TRASH CAN!

Soooooo..... Look, I have to apologize in advance because I had have mislead you. I am not depressed this February.... and it is KILLING me. This is the time every year that I write about February, depression and my favorite February obsession....Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). Instead, here we are half way through the dreaded, dreadful month and...well... I don’t know how to say this but I feel OK. Perhaps it is being self employed. Perhaps it is having my children all gone. I don’t know. My job is busy. I have been working 7 days a week. my wife is working 7 days a week. My Church still does not have a pastor but... everything is kind of OK. In fact it might be good.

My guess is that it is the mild winter we have had. I hate to be cold. I really hate a cold biting wind. But it has not been like that. It has been one of the warmest winters I remember and it has been awesome. In January and early February when there are days you do not need a coat...well, that rocks. Maybe it will be like this year after year and I will never have to be sad again in this darkest of all months. I got up Friday morning and heard the song birds singing and just thought....OOOOOOHHHHHHH NOOOOOO! If things run at all true to form the end of the month or the month of March will have tons of snow and hard freezes and these poor little song birds will be crushed...like February tends to crush the very light of the soul.

***

But lets move on to other things. Had breakfast again Saturday at 11 Mile House. For first half hour I was the only one there other that the guy sweeping the floors and the chatty waitress. The bacon was chewy but other than that it was a perfectly serviceable breakfast. I will give them a few more tries on Saturday morning. one morning I will have a bottle of Busch and play the jukebox at 7:00 A.M. That will be a good day my friends.

***
They, (whoever it is that does sucj things) re-released a special deluxe super duper edition of the Rolling Stones perfect album “Some Girls”. The album had a great mix of ten really good songs and at least 3-4 classics like “Beast of Burden”, “Shattered” and “Miss You”. I rediscovered from that original album the song “Before They Make Me Run” which has been on non stop play in my car.

After all is said and done
Gotta move while it's still fun
Let me walk before they make me run
After all is said and done
I gotta move, it's still fun
I'm gonna walk before they make me run!

With Keith Richard’s rasping the lyrics while he was facing criminal charges in Toronto and recording in Paris... it is just a great angst song. The bonus tracks on the reissue are voluminous and include great songs like “So Young”, “Tallahassee Lassie” and Hank’s “You Win Again”. It is worth buying on iTunes or in the store. Relive it, and if “Beast of Burden” is not the best break up song ever...kiss my ass.

***

Rick Factotum:

Really? Really Republicans? In a year when our economy is the issue. When Big government is THE Problem... you are going to run a converted big government, earmarking Senator who got fired from his own State after one term? I agree the guy is like able though I have in protest stopped wearing sweater vests which he has at least temporarily ruined for me. If you run him, instead of the election being about Big Government which is the election you want, it is going to be about Gay Marriage and Contraception (not even abortion but contraception).

Quote: "One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country.... Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that's okay, contraception is okay. It's not okay. It's a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be."

As a Christian I might agree with some of this. As a sometime libertarian this stuff really frightens me. As a human being I am mortified.

Quote: "In far too many families with young children, both parents are working, when, if they really took an honest look at the budget, they might find they don't both need to. ... What happened in America so that mothers and fathers who leave their children in the care of someone else — or worse yet, home alone after school between three and six in the afternoon — find themselves more affirmed by society? Here, we can thank the influence of radical feminism."

Really? It has nothing to do with the fact that a high school educated man can no longer go out and find a job that supports a family? It is all the radical feminists fault? let me be clear, I hate radical feminists, but reading stuff like this makes me think i would rather have a beer and argue with them than sit with this self satisfied goof with all the answers.

And finally this, though there are more:
Quote: "If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [gay] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does. ... That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing."

I like a conservative Christian man who is really going to spend a lot of time being out there in front of the battle against “gay sex”. WTF? As near as I can tell there is no one under 40 who holds these views. I know that is a generalization but I mean we need to deal with the world as it is and it has moved on. even if Rick has not.

February Wrap Up

Sooooo....we made it through another February. How cool is that? We not have March and with march we have the promise of Spring and with march and the Promise of Spring we have the NCAA Conference Tournaments and the NCAA Tournament and with all of those things we of course have the most important rite of Spring.....THE KUBE KLASSIK! An email blast will be going out from KUBE central as our fearless leader "The Donald" seeks to get us on Pay Pal so that I can no longer mis-handle (embezzle) peoples tournament fees. This is the type of "nanny state" government regulation that we tea party capitalists have been railing against. If people are stupid enough to give Mike Becker money they must want him to either lose it or blow it on booze, drugs and loose women. Right? I do not know what the picture of these three buildings is here for. Sometimes when I am driving around I take pics of things I like. I think these buildings are on the northwest corner of Jefferson and Washington. Very Presidential address. They caught my eye. I like the pic.

***
I do like to take pics sometimes. I was admiring my daughters Converse (she made pains to tell me that she had two more pairs but she was too lazy to get them out of her car) and I thought it would make a cool picture. Now I think, perhaps, but it struck me then what am oddly (stupidly) brand loyal family we are. Becker's in no particular order:
Wear Converse often but not exclusively
Drink Coke products when drinking cola
Drive Japanese cars that do not suddenly accelerate
Compute on MACs
Eat Lays Potato Chips
Like Carl's Hamburgers
Eat Edmund's Chili almost exclusively
Favor The Courtesy Diner
If you have to eat something like fast food....Steak n' Shake
Are Missouri Synod Lutherans (for at least a little while more)
It goes on and on and while to us it might seem quirky or interesting it is probably just a matter of being influenced by advertising and lacking any real creativity or imagination and the enjoyment that we get by condescendingly commenting on other people' choices which are clearly inferior to ours. How annoying is that?

Let's stick with calling it quirky.


***

One of my larger embarrassments in life (and those of you who know me really need to think about that statement) is the detritus of my once highly above average wine collection. I have no idea how many bottles I have left down there. For a while I was getting cases of Duckhorn Merlot every year. I know....I know....but if your going to drink merlot it was the way to go and it was new then. That still does not make it right. Anyway, we moved here a dozen years ago, I put the wine in the basement and pretty much forgot about it. Occasionally I would pull a bottle up on a lark to find it corked or at best well past it's prime. So we were out with some old friends from the wine consuming days and got home early and for memories sake headed back to the basement. I pulled out a couple of bolles but saw I had a 1991 Duckhorn Cabernet Sauvignon. Surprisingly it was not corked. Almost but not quite and well...it was pretty good. Big and fruity and plenty of tannin but on the back end the alcohol kind of overpowered the fruit. It was good and interesting and I need to get after that wine. Perhaps a weekly event as we open taste and dump until we find a good one. Could be a hoot.

***

Laura had backwards dance and she did the whole spa thing with Sandy prior to it. She is on student counsel and had been working all week getting ready for the dance. We have the feeling that in two years our house will be empty with out here. Her fingernails were painted the same color blue as her dress. What is up with that?

***
The Olympics is over I will not be watching the closing ceremonies. The Swedes stole the Gold in women's curling from Canada in the only sport I really followed. Those Swede's are tough. I am now watching the U.S. try and upend Canada for the Gold in men's hockey. YEEEEEEW-ESSSSSSSSSSS-EH?

False Hope And February, Evan Dando and The Yonder Mountain String Band

"Patience is like bread they say. I rand out of that yesterday."- The Lemonheads












This morning I woke and it was sunny and has remained sunny almost all day. I heard song birds...chirping somewhere in the dead brown trees behind our house, over the still frozen driveway where the sun never comes. It was beautiful... it was the promise of Spring and it was of course.... a lie! But that is ok for February is a month where even false promises must be clinged to, cherished and even shared. The fact that the birds might freeze and die a miserable death tomorrow should not impact on my momentary joy. Right?

It has been a brilliant and even pretty good week. Keeping on the theme that I must go out and see live music, no matter how tired and old I am, I hit two shows this week. On Tuesday I went to "The Old Rock House" to see Evan Dando, lead singer, songwriter, chief bottle washer of the seminal indie rock band "The Lemonheads". You will of course remember The Lemonheads for their brilliant cover of Simon & Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson" and their crossover hit "Into Your Arms". Dando was the son of a Boston real estate lawyer and a super model. A poor little rich pretty boy. The last time I had seen Dando was 10 years (or more ago) getting tickets for The Lemonheads show. I ran down to Mississippi Nights to get my tickets and there was this bum passed out in front of the door to the place. That bum was Dando. I didn't know it until I saw him later at the very average show that night. Dando, then, and now looks a lot like our local rock star Steve Stolze. Creepily so.

Crack cocaine evidently does funny things to people. Dando was the rising star with his band. Good looking like a model and dating Juliana Hatfield, Boston indie heart throb with her band "The Blake Babies" and her solo career. Dando was doing his gig and also putting in songs on various tribute CD's to Richard Thompson and Victoria Williams. Buuuuuuut....the crack really seemed to take him out of the loop and off the screen for a long time. So i was happy to see him back, especially solo.

"Enough about us lets talk about me. It's not about you, it's not about sunshine." -The Lemonheads

I got to the Rock House around 9:00. On the way down I got to bail someone out of jail. What a great way to start an evening. There was a band called Candle who opened. I was not excited at all but they were great and it turned out that two of them had been with Ben Kweller's original group back when Ben Kweller looked like he was going to be someone. Ooops. Anyway, they were an unexpected pleasure and I will definitely pick up their debut CD when it comes out in April. The lead singer was playing a big old black Gibson like Neil Young's and then they threw in a little pedal steel as well. What is not to like.

Beatle Bob was there so once again I was secure that i was at least at the coolest show in town. I need that.

Dando came on stage about 10:30. Welcomed the crowd and proceeded in classic indie rock shoe gazer style to not really speak again other then singing. he was in black jeans, a hoody and...wait for it...wait for it....Stan Smith Tennis shoes. Sure I have them but i have not seen another human wear them in at least 15 years. They were new and unscuffed. Made me proud. He had no band. Just he and the acoustic. No effect pedals. he then ripped through the following:

Get so down about it
Outdoor type
Error of my ways
He loved her but he didn't
Why do you do this to yourself
Alisons starting to happen
My drug buddy
Frying pan
When I stop dreaming
I don't want to get high
Forget my past
Its about time

No song lasted more then two minutes. Sometimes he merged one into the other. He didn't inter act with the crowd at all but he held us all in the palm of his hand. He is great songwriter and knows his way around a hook like almost no one else. He played about 20 songs at all primarily from the Lemonheads catalogue and it was just an awesome tour de force of pop.

It was the first show I had seen at the Rock House. The upstairs was closed but it is a pretty room. The sound is a little muddy but if you were up front it sounded fine. It was kind of interesting because in back you could watch the whole show on one of their monitors. Makes me wonder whether they are filming all of it?

***

Friday night was The Yonder Mountain String band at the Pageant. I did not love the show but I think it has more to do with me then with the show. I had a long day at work, went to a fundraiser for Bill Corrigan, had a burger at O'Connells (stuffed like I was dead) and then headed to the Pageant. We got there at 8:00 for an "evening with" show that was to start at 8:30. I had seen these guys a few years ago and did not love them but the venerable Brian Kukla wanted to see them and it was his dad's birthday so....why not? The place was not too packed when we got there and we found some seats (always a plus for old people) in the under 21 section. It is always kind of a bummer when your under 21 and cannot go down on the floor but that is how they had the crowd configured. I always wonder how they decide how many under 21 people they will have at the show. It has to be more of an art then a science. The balcony was open and i have not been there for a while when they had an open balcony. When the balcony is open they have a 2300 capacity and it filled up quick.

The band came out pretty close to on time. It is just a mandolin, an acoustic guitar, an electric stand up bass and a banjo. No percussion, no electric guitar. It was their crowd though and from the first song the whole audience stood and danced in a way I had not seen since Jerry Garcia died. I think of the 2300 people there 2000 knew every song. I know none of their catalogue so it is always interesting for me but they didn't grab me... last time or this time. They had an elaborately lit stage (tacky and un bluegrass like) and did not really play all that well (other the the acoustic guitarist who is a tremendous flat picker. He really was good. But the problem is in a blue grass band, like a jazz band, like the dead, the band works on a theme and then the guys put in a little solo. Their solos all sounded the same. The mandolin is a neat instrument but it needs to be used sparingly while they have no choice but to use it as part of the rhythm section.

It was a cometent show but after two viewings I will not be tempted to see them again. I got a cool poster though.

Annual February Whine/Rant

Regular readers of these pages know of my passion for the month of February. Referring to it variously as "The Long Dark Tea Time Of The Soul" (thank you Douglas Adams), the month of Darkness, the time in St. Louis when there are "a lot of suicides", "my time of despair". In Groundhog Day Bill Murray speaks generally to my feelings about February: " I'll give you a winter prediction: It's gonna be cold, it's gonna be grey, and it's gonna last you for the rest of your life." Yes... that summarizes it. The Holidays are firmly over. Although the shortest day of the year is well behind us the cooling that these short days have accomplished on the earth's crust and the lower atmosphere continue unabated. It is 6:28 A.M. as I type this and there is no sign of light. This evening after work I will drive home in the dark...again.

Many old people go south for this time of year and as I age (badly and prematurely...and bitterly) I understand why. Cold makes my bones hurt. Aside from my clear depression and SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) everything hurts more. My skin, which every year diminishes in it's elasticity (supposedly due to my aging cells not being able to reproduce enough copies of themselves, and the copies they produce evidently weakening and becoming more inferior in every generation) dries to a point where finger tip crack and I itch...all day and all night like I was being devoured by bugs!

So we have that going for us. It is a time to hunker down. You cannot really wait for Spring at this point because the promise of Spring is so illusory as to be criminal. Here are few tips for surviving until the plants start to sprout and birds start to head back north again.
1. Watch a lot of college basketball. It is a great sport with great competition. Even though it is likely dominated by large, corrupt, steroid juiced programs it is still one of the purest nightly spectacles of athleticism we are treated to. It eventually leads to March Madness and in March there is of course the hope of Spring.

2. Hunker down in bars. They are dark, so you do not notice it is dark outside. Even at noon. Look for bars with fireplaces. look for bars with lots of alcohol. Look for bars with jukeboxes. Make sure you get a ride home.

3. Watch a lot of television. Really along these same lines avoid higher art and literature all together. it will only make you feel bad. On the other hand an old episode of" Malcolm In The Middle" allows you to reflect on how much better you have been spending your time then the people did who wrote and acted in this series.

4. Quit your job and/or stop going to school.

5. Stay away from fire arms, knives and high ledges and cliffs.

6. Do not make any major moves in relationships.

7. For God's sake don't even think about exercising!

8. When possible, yell at your children and blame them for things (like your failed dream of becoming a water colorist).

9. Avoid simple, innocent and kind people as you do not want to be responsible for dragging them down with you.

10. Rub lard all over your body to avoid the afor mentioned dryness that comes with this weather.

11. Kick the dog. if you are blessed as I am to have two dogs, only kick one. The fact that you are not kicking the other dog will make the kicked dog feel even worse.

12. Yell at your kids again.

It is a time to hunker down. To be thankful for little things like space heaters and hot coffee. It is a reasonably good time to contemplate the miserable wreck your life has become and to make some plans for the future and resolutions to change...once it gets warm. Drink some more. Watch some more television.

So, tonight I am watching "The Untouchables having gone through several hours of oral surgery on a cracked tooth and I am...waiting for the snow. They started by saying one inch and now they are saying a total of six inches. I am excited because I like the disruption of the snow. I feel like an old man but as a sometimes boss I feel like when you know it is going to snow, you get up an hour earlier, you make plans for child care, and you get you ass to work. But that is not the way it is any more. Now, when it snows it seems to stop everything. And this February, if it is going to be cold, and dark, and gray... let it snow. That might cheer me up.