Life and Times

Just hit me while I was out on my nightly walks how many different things I got going on right now.

• New job, in legal support: the kind of job I've been looking for the last 15 years. Now I'm in it, and I've got a lot to learn. Could turn into something full-time, at a decent salary, but it's a government job, and hiring there could be kind of screwy. Good as I may be for the job, and however much I may want it, there's no telling how this will play out.
• The job's got me up at 5:30am, Monday to Friday, and that's an adjustment. My sleep schedule has gone to hell. The insomnia I've had all my life hasn't really acted up--but the thought that it might is disquieting enough to...well, lose sleep over....
• My property manager has been in to do some fixes in my apartment three times in the last week. I try to keep my place in presentable shape, that being one of the advantages to living on my own--given my living arrangements before I got this place (living with Hammerhead, who would do nothing in the interest of the upkeep of the apartment, then insist "We can't have anyone over to visit: look at the state of this place!"). But it feels different if you're used to having an apartment all to yourself, then having someone coming in while you're not there (he's come by while I'm at work). But now I have a living room with very different lighting: he's replaced all the blinds, including the vertical ones for the balcony sliding door. None of them worked, so I was stuck with what light they let in. Now I can fine tune, and the room feels a lot better.
• Just watched MELINDA AND MELINDA, the Woody Allen movie I've had from NetFlix sitting on my TV for the last seven months. Haven't sent a movie back to them since July; at $20/month, I'm their ideal customer. I've had the Neve Campbell movie WHEN WILL I BE LOVED since December and still haven't watched it.
• My best friend left for India on Tuesday; he'll be gone for three months. He and his wife and kid will be studying yoga under an honest-to-Krishna guru. Imagine the contortions. Anyway, that's a pretty impoverished part of the world, and I hope they don't come down with dysentery or dengue fever or anything.
• Got another friend that may be on the rocks with his girlfriend. Got a call from her the other morning, from his cell phone. Asking about his whereabouts on Sunday. I don't dig the whole jealousy bit, but I certainly don't want to ruin things between them by speaking carelessly. Talked to him yesterday, says he's got some things to tell me about. That doesn't sound good.
• My 20-year high school reunion was last Friday. Went down there and crashed it; wasn't going to pay $70 for a buffet and a nametag. Oddly enough, most people recognized me without one. I had a better time than I expected: it dredged up a lot of high school nostalgia, as you may expect. Now, I was never social in high school (which will come as a surprise to those of you who know me...), so making my way around a room like that was a new experience with this crowd. I came into my own in college, not high school like most people, so I remember high school as being a lot of fun but I missed out on a lot. I never thought I'd want to talk to my old classmates after all these years, but I found that that's exactly what I'd like to do: I realize I knew a lot of really cool people that I never fully interacted with. And yet, I left without getting anybody's contact information. I feel like I screwed up all over again.
• I might be getting a roommate soon; since my rent got hiked, it makes more sense than living by myself with more space than I actually need. There's someone I was hoping would move in and help out for a few months, since she's looking for work and not having much luck. I've been advising her on her resume and job search for the past week or so, and now she seems to have landed something. Meaning, she may not be coming after all.
• I'm not keeping up my webpage often enough; even with this blog, I only post every other week or so, and it's the easiest thing in the world to use. So why can't I find the time?
• It's election season, and for the first time in a long time I'm excited. In less than two weeks, I expect to see the necessary corrective to the very depressing state of affairs that began in November 2000. It had to end some time, and I have something to look forward to.

I consider my life pretty mundane. And yet I've got a lot to think about. Don't ever feel that life passes you by--look at it in all its details.

Exile On Main Street

Never saw the Rolling Stones live, so when they came through (again) I just had to. Ticket for a seat on the floor, toward the back, cost $150, plus there was about $45 in taxes and fees. I could have gone for the $350 seats about sixty feet closer, but this was already abusing my budget.

The Dave Matthews Band was opening, and I'll confess to not having heard much of them. I remember that "Crash" song from about ten years ago, but that didn't make a fan of me. So I didn't plan on being there for that; figured The Stones would go on about eight, so I left the apartment around 5:30pm, with the objective of finding parking somewhere in the International District and getting several drinks at Temple Billiards until about 7:30pm, then heading over.

I got as far as Belltown. I expected traffic to be dense, but Manhattan rules were in effect here. After moving two blocks in almost ten minutes down Second Avenue, I just pulled off near Virginia and paid $10 for a parking space. I crossed the street to use the bathroom at The Starlite Lounge, figuring to get a quick drink there and walk the mile down to Qwest Field from there.

The Starlite is quite something. A bit tony, but nice: done up in crimson, with low-key lighting, and a big charcoal drawing of Sinatra, Martin, and Davis Jr above the bar. I gotta check that place out again--and they make a decent Long Island.

With that shooting to my head, I walked downtown to Temple Billiards, a pool hall in Pioneer Square. After two more Long Islands, I headed over to the show. They must make them stronger than I would have thought, since I lost my hat somewhere between Temple and Qwest Field. So if you see a homeless person in Pioneer Square wearing a dark blue nylon ball cap, you can think to yourself "Russ really enjoyed the show."

I'd never been to Qwest Field before (since I hate sports). Not bad, pretty spacious, easy to get around. I found my seat, discovered that the view was pretty good. The Dave Matthews Band was in its closing number--and I thought they sounded pretty good. Turns out the sound overall was exceptional: the writeup in the Times said it was one of the best sounding shows ever to play there. Leave it to The Rolling Stones to deliver. Certainly the stage show was impressive. It's one thing to have a five-storey Jumbotron; it's another having good coverage. The camerawork was truly captivating--it really captured the band very well.

They opened with "Jumpin' Jack Flash", and it was electric. Exactly what I wanted from a Stones concert. I like musicians, not singers, so I've only lately come to appreciate how good Mick Jagger is in his job. Me, I was watching Keith Richards the whole time, one of my guitar heroes. Didn't seem to be slowing down any. The highlight was when he took center stage for "You Got the Silver", followed by "Little T & A", two of my favorites of his.

Then there was the mid-point of the show, where a section of the stage rolled out to the center of the floor seating, so that even those of us in the back got a close-up view of the band performing "Start Me Up" and a few others. It was great.

Only thing that I found disappointing was that the show was only two hours long. Forty years of music, and you can only do a two-hour show? When Led Zeppelin played the LA Palladium back in the 70's, they were on for five hours. When I saw Rush at The Gorge in '97, they played for over three hours. I pay $200 and I only get two hours?

Two hours of The Stones. Can't get that anywhere else.

I put the earplugs in after the show--as a way of easing the impact on my eardrums after the fact. I walked out of Qwest and up to the first bus stop on First Ave. I soon realized that there wasn't going to be much room on the city buses, so I just walked up First to my car, mile and a half away. Drove to Queen Anne, the Mecca Cafe, had a roast beef sandwich and potatoes. Gravy on the side. And a beer and a shot. Then drove back to the apartment. Now that's a concert.

The end of an era

Looks like Tower Records is gone for good. My first job out of college was at Tower Video, just outside the Tacoma Mall. This was back in 1990; I got $4.50/hour to work the counter, shelve videos, and work TicketMaster. The benefits back then actually looked better than those offered now in 2006: I had full medical and dental, and none of the HMO and PPO hassle that you get currently. As a McJob goes, it wasn't as bad as it could have been, I suspect: fast food will always carry that connotation.

Maybe that's what was most disingenuine about CLERKS II: whereas Kevin Smith really knew his territory in the first CLERKS, in that convenience store, you didn't get the sense in this sequel of someone who had spent an intolerable amount of time working the fryer or the drive-thru. And as such, transposing his angst from a convenience store to a fast-food franchise, is he right or just making a convenient cultural cross-reference?

Whatever. I evolved beyond counter-clerk into whatever I am now. But my time at Tower Video was a definitive part of that evolution. When that Tacoma store closed in 1997, I remember the write-up in the Tacoma NEWS TRIBUNE. It made mention of the fact that some of the clerks there were ill-mannered and discourteous; I have to think that some of that was aimed at me specifically. I don't know what Quentin Tarantino was like as a clerk at that video rental in Manhattan Beach, but I gotta think that he was better than I was. Me, I was Randal Graves: the customers all wanted bad movies, and we stocked them in excess. It was a McJob, and I viewed it as such, not knowing how much it would inform the remainder of my working life.

So now Tower is no more. Well, that's sad, since as a chain they weren't as lockstep as Wherehouse or Sam Goody. Fortunately, there's plenty of market competition to include most of what Tower was offering, so the battle isn't lost. But I can remember a time when you couldn't find it in town, so you'd go to Tower. Which was open til midnight. And I worked that shift, for better than a year. Once upon a time.