Sleep, perchance to dream

Ok, I know that the Wednesday Night Music Club was yesterday but I just have to post this. I’ve been a David Ford fan for a while now. Saw him open for Gomez and even though I knew absolutely nothing about the guy I was blown away by his set including the fact that I think he ended by blowing every speaker and breaking three guitar strings and not caring a bit about it. The guy is a genius at looping. Takes what Howie Day was doing and a) improves on it artistically and b) doesn’t act like a total douche in the process. This is from his latest disc and this video is live and one take and real. Watch it and be amazed.

My extended unemployment has resulted in an unforeseen development though any intelligent person would have foreseen it. My schedule has reverted to the same as it was when I was in school. I originally assumed that I would just be running a modified work schedule. I would sleep in later because I wouldn’t have a commute and didn’t need to be dressed but I’d still be doing whatever needed to be done by nine in the morning. Probably be in bed by midnight. Oh, how wrong I was.

Now some of this is my doing and I wouldn’t change that for the world. If being slightly less productive is the price I have to pay for enjoying myself so be it. I also have succumbed to the fact that I know bartenders and they also work on Monday nights. That is a very nasty habit and while I may not break it I at least need to time it better. But the more interesting one is the fact that since everyone knows I am unemployed they also know that they can call me at any time day or night and assume I will answer. I typically will though just understand that my sleep habits will suffer in the process.

What all of this means is that it has been absolute torture trying to get out of bed in the morning and my phone is conspiring against me. Back when I had a job one of my products was this wonderful service where you would sign up for text messages to be automatically sent to your phone. Things like the weather forecast or your horoscope or pictures of chicks in bikinis (hey, I didn’t say it was a bad job). Well, I haven’t cancelled any of my subscriptions (because I really do like the product) but it does mean that every morning my phone will repeatedly beep at me while all these messages arrive. Despite the fact that I would really, really like to sleep through them and even though my phone is in the next room I still hear them.

Now when I complained about this today someone who is much wiser than I am responded with a) why don’t you just turn your phone off or b) why don’t you just cancel your subscription. To which I responded a) because I’m an idiot and b) because then I wouldn’t have anything to complain about. See, I need things to complain about, the more trivial the better. Partly it is my belief that imperfections make the world a better place. They make things interesting and the fact that my phone beeps at me at seven every morning is both annoying and kind of cool. I take it over living in a hermetically sealed bubble. The other is this strange yin yang notion of my life. I know there has to be something bad going on at all times and if I can make that bad thing the most inconsequential thing possible and focus all of my anger on this completely frivolous, easily solved problem then the rest of my life will be easy to deal with. Yes, it is a completely convoluted view of the world but it works for me.

Basically what I am saying is I am so looking forward to falling asleep in about ten minutes. I’ll try to write something more interesting tomorrow.

One last walk down the aisle

I would like to apologize to everyone who was expecting to see me write the results of Star Wars-a-palooza tonight. Despite my previously stated intentions I did not in fact spend the first full day of my unemployment by sitting on my couch and watching every episode of Star Wars in order. I instead got to spend the morning doing something more enjoyable than watching the prequels. Ok, that is damning with faint praise. Let’s just say that there are some things in my life more important than Star Wars. No one will actually believe that but it is true.

(I did however spend my first day of unemployment by hanging out directly across the street from my old office. Seriously, I could see my cube from there. That just seemed totally unfair. Cool, but unfair.)

However, that was sadly just the morning so by about 1:30 in the afternoon I discovered that I was watching Rachel Ray and going slowly insane due to boredom. How bad was it? Not only did I clean my apartment this afternoon, not only did I disassemble my vacuum cleaner in order to optimize my vacuuming experience, but I even mopped the floors. Heck, I even drove to the store to get a new mop for the occasion. True, I needed to mop the floors since my entryway still had shoeprint shaped dirt marks where all the snow and slush had melted off my shoes but for crying out loud why the hell am I mopping floors? If this is what I do on day one what the hell am I going to be doing on day 27?

Anyway, I need to royally switch gears here because I have a topic that I need to discuss tonight. It is something that is pretty much the ultimate in geekery for me and if I ever wanted to impress someone by what I write this topic would never come up but damnit, it’s my blog and I write what I need to write. Last night was “The Nature Boy” Ric Flair’s last match and tonight was his official retirement sendoff and I just have to try to explain this to people who might not follow wrestling.

Ric Flair had a 36 year career and he was a top of the card star for 30 of those. When I say that I have watched Flair wrestle my entire life it is not a joke. That’s how long he has been in the business. Throughout that time he was consistently the best wrestler around and for maybe a ten year period from 84 to 94 he was probably the greatest performer who ever wrestled. Looking at his career in total there is no one who would even come close to comparing to the guy. He could talk, he could wrestle, he could tell a story in the ring and he could make you forget that everything that you were watching was predetermined. The guy was simply the best.

One of the horrible things about the wrestling business (and there are more than a few) is that once you hit the end of your career you are pretty much forgotten. You go from being on television to wrestling in high school gyms. There is no sendoff, no retiring of a jersey, just the fact that one day you are no longer on television. Given the political nature of the business if you’ve pissed off the wrong people over the years you might even be written out of the history. There are more than a few wrestlers that the WWE will not acknowledge even existed. I always feared that Ric Flair, someone who maybe meant more to wrestling than anyone else, would end up that way.

Luckily that has not been the case. Sure, Ric should have retired a while ago as he really was too old to perform as Ric Flair but he deserved one last run in the spotlight. What’s more important is that he got to have one last match in front of 70,000 people and tonight he was honored by the fans and the wrestlers. I’ve never really seen anything like it. Ric said his goodbyes and thank yous to the crowd and then they started to bring on all of the legends from the past. By the end the entire locker room, every single person who works for WWE, was out there applauding and thanking Ric for what he has done. This is the equivalent to saying goodbye to Jordan or to Ruth. The best ever has laced up the boots for the last time. Enjoy retirement Ric.