Daily Album on CD: ‘Born on a Pirate Ship,’ Barenaked Ladies

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This CD is the first of many things in my music collection. It’s the first one I ever (as an adult) that on its release date I raced to the music shop to purchase it and immediately listen to it the moment I got home. It’s also the first one I have had signed by the members of the band. In addition, it’s the first one I ever had to replace due to it getting excessively scratched after years of rough handing.

This is the album that BNL was supporting during the New Year’s Eve 1996 show where I first encountered Paula Cole, and it really was the soundtrack to my first several months of living in NYC after moving up there in July 1996. I can still easily recall listening to this album on my Panasonic Shockman player when walking along the east side of Central Park in the evening while walking back to my apartment on Yorkville section of Manhattan from my job just off of Times Square. While “The Old Apartment” became the band’s first US hit, it wasn’t one of my favorite tracks at the time. Those were “Shoe Box,” “If I Should Fall,” “Break Your Heart,” and “Same Thing.” However, in the years since, my favorite track off the album, and one of my all-time favorite deep cuts by anyone, has become “Just a Toy” — a dark anthropomorphic dive into the mind the marionette Gepetto made just before Pinnochio and the jealousy he harbors against his younger brother.

The other interesting thing about this album is that was released as an Enhanced CD, meaning that it was encoded with Mac & PC software that allowed you to interact with additional bonus material when you put it in your computer. Unfortunately, the experience of using the Enhanced CD features is long gone as neither operating system allows you to play that software anymore. In fact, the Mac OS doesn’t even recognize the file system used on the CD, so it’s impossible to even check out the assorted sound and video files that the software used (this was something I was still able to do roughly 10-15 years ago.)

Daily Album on CD: ‘This Fire,’ by Paula Cole

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Opening acts are the crapshoot of going to concerts. Frequently, you’ve never previously heard of the opener, but the fact they are opening for the headlining act typically means that the headliners like them enough to believe that more people should know about them. I’ve gone to enough concerts over the years to absolutely forget a significant percentage of the ones I’ve seen. Others I remember because they were either awful (to my ears) or in the case of one particular band, they were so aggressively boring that I actually feel asleep in my seat during their set. There were a couple who were the reason I actually went to the concert — 4 Non Blondes and Echobelly — and then there was Paula Cole, who utterly blew me away and inspired me to get their most recent album at the next opportunity.

She was actually one of two opening acts on the evening that Barenaked Ladies performed a show at the former Roseland Ballroom in NYC on New Year’s Eve, 1996. Cannot tell you who the other one was, but Cole left a lasting impression. I don’t recall anything about the success of This Fire or any of its singles at that moment in time, but the energy and raw emotion she displayed that evening made you pay attention. Over thirty years later, I don’t recall any of the rest of her setlist, but there’s no way that “Throwing Stones” — my personal favorite of the This Fire album — Cole didn’t play it that night. The memory of her absolutely pounding the final chords of the song out of the piano combined with the way she almost screamed the final lyrics is just too firmly planted in my memory for it not to have happened. That song alone would’ve made me want to get ahold of it for my music library, but the rest of her performance left no doubt that buying the album was the prudent choice.

Oh, BNL was also spectacular that night. It was my second time seeing them live, and thanks to the concert, it was the closest I have ever been to Times Square when the ball dropped (the Roseland was approximately 10 blocks away.)

Revisting LiveJournal

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Thanks to some scuttlebutt over on Bluesky on New Year’s Day regarding the site’s short- and long-term prospects, I recently decided to visit my old LiveJournal accounts and start cut-and-pasting the text from my posts into a Word document. Nothing fancy — I’m not preserving the formatting, tags, comments, timestamp, or any other peripheral information. Just the date, title, and primary text. I’m also not including memes or shared links that are only accompanied by a line or two of snarky commentary. Thus far, I’ve saved the period covering November 3, 2004 through July 29, 2005. The file contains over 28,000 words and is nearly 75 pages long.

Damn, I wrote a lot — and frankly overshared far more — back in the day.

I haven’t looked at most of this material in years. So, while working my way through the posts, I’ve skimmed them. It’s been… enlightening. The period I’ve downloaded thus far covers a period in time where, in retrospect, I was beginning to burn out in my previous profession. At the time, I thought I was just in a bad work situation, and during 2005 I had a multi-month long job hunt that led me to the last of the positions I held as an executive assistant. However, the combination of rereading what I wrote and what I recall from being an E.A. at a big four accounting and consulting firm makes it pretty clear that it wasn’t situational at all. No, it was the job itself. The things I’m complaining about in those posts are frankly the kinds of things I dealt with at all my jobs as an E.A. from the summer of ’96 through the end of ’06.

It’s also the period where Brandon was a toddler, and it’s a joy to be reminded of little things that happened during that time that I hadn’t thought about in years. It was also the period where I launched Some Fantastic — something I’m still immensely proud of. Frankly, in retrospect, I’m not entirely certain how I managed to achieve so much during that period.

Reading all this material is also motivating me to start posting here more. I certainly don’t need to post as often as I did in the old LJ days, and that certainly applies moreso to the oversharing that took over there. However, the Bluesky and Facebook formats encourage a style of writing that really isn’t me. The one thing I’ve successfully internalized over the past few years is the need to be my authentic self. It’s time to apply that to posting online as well. 

Today’s Album on CD: ‘Sports,’ by Huey Lewis and The News

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(This is a series I originally started on Facebook several weeks ago. This is a revised cross-post. Starting tomorrow I will be posting these here.)

I recently had a random recollection that this was the first album I ever owned (on cassette.) It really is mind-boggling how many hits Huey Lewis and The News had in the ’80s. Before listening to it, my recollection was that they made exceptionally crafted middle-of-the-road pop/rock that was absolutely recognizable as a product of its era, but was otherwise not particularly special. It’s nice background music, but without this little project I’ve embarked upon, I don’t know if I otherwise would’ve listened to this album in any format. However, after listening to Sports in full, I decided I might have been a little harsh with this assessment. A couple of the songs actually held up rather nicely: “If This Is It” and the lesser hit, “Walking on a Thin Line.”

Side note: Hootie and The Blowfish are absolutely the ’90s version of Huey Lewis and The News, only with significantly fewer hits. How well would we remember them if not for the one Friends episode with the five steaks and an eggplant?

My Year in Music (Frak Spotify Wrapped)

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To repeat what I said last year in My Year in Music (My Version of Spotify Wrapped), though I have a Spotify account, the way I use the service – which, not coincidentally, I have just canceled our premium family subscription plan to because of the variety of ways it is an absolutely shitsome company – simply doesn’t reflect or capture the overwhelming amount of music listening I do. Because of this, the 2023 Spotify Wrapper inspired me to begin exporting on December 1 of each year the usage/meta data from my actively curated Apple Music library, which contains over 23,000 songs that we actually own. Thanks to some above-average Excel skills, this is now the second year in a row I’ve been able to assemble a report to Spotify’s while denying them the ability to gather the user data needed to both create it and, more importantly, monetize and use it for their own nefarious needs.

So, without further preamble, my 2025 year in music…

Listened for 54,871 minutes (highly enabled by working from home and having music on most of the time while doing so,) or 38.1 days of music. I would like to note that my recent transition into playing whole albums on CD rather than through my music library is not captured in this data.

Played 4,501 different songs (I often simply shuffle the whole library.)

Streamed my top song, “Say Goodbye to Mum and Dad” by Tears for Fears, 41 times.

The top song leaderboard:

  1. “Say Goodbye to Mum and Dad,” Tears for Fears
  2. “Astronaut,” Tears for Fears
  3. “Uptown Funk,” Mark Ronson feat. Bruno Mars
  4. “The Girl That I Call Home,” Tears for Fears
  5. “Dear God,” Black Landlord
  6. “Emily Said,” Tears for Fears
  7. “Landlocked,” Tears for Fears
  8. “Close to Me,” The Cure
  9. “Change,” Tears for Fears
  10. “Wrong Bitch” (extended mix,) Todrick Hall feat. Bob the Drag Queen

The first five Tears for Fears songs were an EP (of sorts) of new material embedded at the start of their 2-disc Songs for a Nervous Planet album, which was otherwise a really good live best-of compilation. I listened to that EP independently of the rest of the album frequently, which caused those songs to dominate the list. Just to see what the Top 10 have looked like without those songs, here are the next five in the list:

  1. “And Love Goes On,” Earth, Wind & Fire
  2. “Turns the Love to Anger,” Erasure
  3. “Self Control,” Laura Branigan
  4. “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This,” Eurythmics
  5. “Echo Beach,” Martha and the Muffins

Moving on…

Listened to 1,161 artists.

Top artist was Tears for Fears. Played their songs 650 times for a total of 2,881 minutes. (This was the second year in a row that they top my list, and it wasn’t even close.

My top artists, based on song plays:

  1. Tears for Fears
  2. Erasure
  3. Pet Shop Boys
  4. Depeche Mode
  5. Barenaked Ladies
  6. Duran Duran
  7. Eurythmics
  8. New Order
  9. Suzanne Vega
  10. Ghost

It’s worth noting that if this was based on minutes played instead, Suzanne Vega would fall out of the Top 10, and The Alan Parsons Project would move into the 10th spot.

Finally, attempting to determine which album I listened to the most is exceedingly problematic, though I feel I have a very good guess as to how Spotify calculated it. So, without attempting to come up with parameters for filtering and sorting the data in an effort to determine it, I’ll just note that there were two albums released in 2025 that I listened to each over a dozen times: Flying With Angels by Suzanne Vega and Skeletá by Ghost.

35 Years Later

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My 35-year high school class reunion is taking place in two weeks. Amusingly, I’ve been to more of my wife’s reunions than my own. In fact, I’ve only been to one of mine, the 10-year. As you may surmise, that one provided zero motivation for me to attend future ones. To starkly illustrate, that reunion provided a wonderful anecdote I’ve loved sharing over the years. My previous wife went with me to that one, and I informed her in advance that I hadn’t seen or talked to anyone from my graduating class in the interim. As we walked back to my car at the end of the night, she said, “I can see why you haven’t talked to any of those assholes since high school.”

Before I go further, I first need to share a little something about my high school experience. While I understand that most people, at a minimum, do not look back fondly on that time of their life, my teen years were kind of brutal. I was basically an outcast, and while I got along well enough with the others who were also in all the advanced and college prep classes, I also didn’t have any real friends amongst them. In fact, my best and only real friend at the time, Dave, was an anti-authoritarian metalhead who was constantly getting in trouble with the school administration. He was dyslexic, likely ADHD, and almost certainly high functioning autistic (things that schools in the late ’80s just were not looking for nor equipped to handle.) In fact, the administration basically badgered him into dropping out. In addition, he was actually a year behind me — I only got to know him because he lived a block away.

(There’s a great story about how we met, but that would be digressing far too much.)

Anyway, for all practical purposes, I felt like an outcast in high school. It didn’t help that my signature blend of neurospiciness made me a target of ridicule for some of the jocks at the school. Nothing intense — I wasn’t bullied (that only happened in elementary and middle school) — but it was enough to make me dread interacting with those mouthbreathers when at gym class or the other times we crossed paths. Frankly, high school felt like something I needed to endure and survive. The biggest positive that happened during that time was that the isolation I felt allowed me to fully embrace my weirdness during my senior year. I grew a mullet tail, created my first decorated denim jacket, and using the money I made at my part-time job, bought enough different pairs of Converse Chuck Taylors to do the Punky Brewster thing with them.

So, in an incredibly demented and sad way, not social, I at least got to be my authentic self in all its glory that year.

It’s in that spirit I’m going this year’s reunion.

Yes, I’m going with the dial turned, with extreme prejudice, all the way to 11. Weird nerdy t-shirt with an esoteric reference to a movie or TV show. Check. Glitter-covered Chuck Taylors? Absolutely. Gothic velvet rainbow pride kilt? Fuck, yeah! The only question is whether I wear my silver sequin-covered jacket or one of my brightly colored and decorated denim jackets. I’m going to arrive in full fabulousity, the way Romy and Michele should have when they first arrived at their 10-year reunion.

I’m going to fucking enjoy myself, arriving like a conquering visigoth, and not just because in the interim I’ve married the valedictorian. Okay, she went to a different high school, but humor me here… I’m rolling. (Besides, do you understand how hard it is for a neurospicy cis hetero male to find and marry one. There are *far* fewer of them than cheerleaders.) I’m living my best life at the age of 53, and I want to show it off.

So, for those of you reading this who are also going to be at the reunion, consider this both a promise and an advance warning. In fact, I would love it if you showed up flying your own freak flag as well. It would be legend… wait for it…

March 3, 2025, 4:15 AM

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Currently thinking about Harlan Ellison’s waxing philosophically about being a part of the walking dead.1 Along those lines, I’d love nothing more than to just live a life untroubled by the knowledge of the world around me. I know that for the overwhelming majority of people throughout human history, life has been hard – my comparatively cushy life contains privileges I’m sure to don’t comprehend. Nonetheless, I currently function under the strain of a couple of anxieties that are paradoxically separate yet also somewhat intertwined: anxiety over the current state of affairs here in the United States, and anxiety over the many existential threats looming over the long-term survival of the human species (and if not the species, then absolutely human civilization as we now know it.)

Anyway, the upshot is that waking up in the middle of the night and then having issues getting back to sleep is a real thing. Some nights, such as this evening, reading fiction after waking up in the middle of the night allows my brain to settle down enough for sleep to resume. In fact, I spent most of the past two hours doing just that before my focus drifted from my ebook to jotting down the thoughts now appearing on the screen. Thus far, tonight – maybe I should really say “early morning” – this effort to burn down my mental energy hasn’t worked. 

(Quick aside: it seems amusingly fucked up that reading Deadline, a novel set in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, is preferable to letting the anxiety siblings run amok in my head.) 

Anyway, for some time now, I’ve been saying I needed to start forcing myself to write again in some fashion. All things considered, maybe using insomnia time to write, in addition to the reading, may not be the worst impetus to make that start happening.

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1 “You think I enjoy getting up angry every morning, going to bed angry every night? To go through the day with the veins standing out, the bolts unscrewing in my neck? Jesus Christ, I would give anything to be able to be as mellow and cool as most people. I would be one of those slaves, the walking dead, but it would be a relief. Give me six months as a walking dead and I will never say anything angry again.” — Harlan Ellison, Dreams With Sharp Teeth

My Year in Music (My Version of Spotify Wrapped)

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As I stated on Bluesky and Facebook yesterday, I only use Spotify to try out new-to-me music before deciding whether I like it enough to purchase it (preferably on CD in order to rip my own high quality digital tracks) and add it to my Apple Music library. Thus, Spotify Wrapped doesn’t properly present my listening this year.

However, last year I planned ahead and at the time Spotify started providing last year’s Wrapped reports to its listeners, I performed an export of the listening stats and associated song data from my Apple Music library. Then when this year’s Wrapped reports went out, I did another such export. Thanks to some decent Excel skills, I was able to create a similar report without having my data mined.

Here are the expanded stats:

Listened for 57,404 minutes (highly enabled by working from home and having music on most of the time while doing so.)

Played 4,922 songs (I frequently shuffle the whole library.)

Streamed my top song, Florence + The Machine’s “Dog Days Are Over,” 40 times.

The top song leaderboard:

1.  “Dog Days Are Over,” Florence + The Machine
2.  “Uptown Funk,” Mark Ronson
3.  “Dear God,” Black Landlord
4.  “Wrong Bitch” (extended mix,) Todrick Hall feat. Bob the Drag Queen
5.  “Gronlandic Edit,” of Montreal
6.  “I Was Made for Lovin’ You,” KISS
7.  “Off the Wall,” Michael Jackson
8.  “Rapture,” Blondie
9.  “My Demons,” Tears for Fears
10.  “West End Girls,” Pet Shop Boys

Listened to 1,183 artists.

Top artist was Tears for Fears. Played their songs 715 times for a total of 3,179 minutes. (This was the year I deep-dived into their catalog, listening for the first time to four different albums, which included this year’s new album of concert tracks plus five new songs.)

My top artists, based on song plays:

1.  Tears for Fears
2.  Erasure
3.  Barenaked Ladies
4.  Pet Shop Boys
5.  Duran Duran
6.  Weezer
7.  They Might Be Giants
8.  The Decemberists
9.  Eurythmics
10.  The Alan Parsons Project

It’s worth noting that if this was based on minutes played instead, They Might Be Giants would fall out of the Top 10 all the way to 14th, and Depeche Mode would move into the 10th spot. TMBG really do write songs that are much shorter on average than those released by nearly all other bands.

Sleep, Perchance to Dream

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It’s now 6:15 AM, and this means, for the third day in a row, I’ve been awake for two hours or more. The good news is, according to my sleep app on my watch, that I got 6½ hours of solid sleep last night – which is only 1½ hours less than what I got the previous two nights combined. The solid sleep was also an improvement, given that those same two previous nights included numerous instances of waking up and needing a few minutes to get back to sleep. Alas, these improvements only occurred because I was out by 9:15 and aided by a standard adult dose of generic Benedryl. Tonight, I’ll try to go to bed later, and see if I can get a good night’s sleep without help. If it doesn’t work as hoped, back comes the Benedryl tomorrow night.

Given that this is Sally’s and my vacation week, I was hoping to be able to get much more regular and solid sleep. Alas, the implications of the elections are exactly the kind of thing that my sleep-impaired brain latches onto when I wake up in the middle of the night. Under the best of circumstances, my brain is capable of latching onto the most ridiculous and nonsensical of things that, when returning to bed after needing to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, can ultimately result in not falling asleep again for anywhere between 30 minutes and two hours. Since the election, waking up for any reason after 3:00 AM and recalling any of the realistic nightmares being enabled by the return of the Der Katzengropenführer just means I’m up for the day.

Something will have to give on that front eventually. I don’t want to become dependent on sleep aids to get a good night’s sleep, and regularly waking up for the day between 3:00-4:00 AM is not feasible. For now, I’m just going to do my best to enjoy and make the best use of my awake time on vacation – there’s still plenty on our to do list we’d like to accomplish before needing to return home – and if the need and opportunity for afternoon naps arises, I’ll absolutely make use of them.

The Trump for President Trilogy

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As of this morning, I’m not engaging with social media or any news providers (internet or otherwise) for a full 24 hours, if not longer. As I said yesterday on Facebook, this is a self-care decision. Frankly, while I intellectually understand how it is this country got to its current sociopolitical state, emotionally I’m am utterly horrified and demoralized. I’ve been saying for some time that when you closely look at history, it’s easily apparent that at any given moment 30-35% of every society — no matter its place, time, or construction — would gleefully welcome an authoritarian populist dictator.

The United States is not exceptional in any way in regards to this. Oh, there was a time in the aftermath of World War II where we as a nation could easily create and buy into a fiction that we were somehow different/better, but the only ones who truly believed that were those who were benefitting from a toxically sexist and racist patriarchal structure. I don’t want to spend the time here getting into how that structure was overwhelmingly undermined by the most powerful white men in the country out of sheer greed, but as they did so, they made sure that those on the bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder who had been benefitting more than others would absolutely not blame them. Trump and his faux populism is nothing more than one of the logical endpoints of a long-game that right-wing forces have been playing for decades.

No America’s capability for fascism and/or authoritarianism has always been there. It made itself abundantly clear on Feb. 20, 1939 at Madison Square Garden. It made itself abundantly clear as the Jim Crow-era South literally used lethal force during the Civil Rights Era. It made itself abundantly clear during Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden on October 27.

The difference now is that Trump, unlike any Presidential candidate in my lifetime, keeps making statements about he will use Presidential power to punish his enemies, and those who by traditional American peaceful standards, oppose him. It’s not something I ever witnessed or experienced until the first installment of his Trump for President trilogy back in 2016. The thing that truly rattled me is just how receptive so many of his supporters were to the hateful and violent rhetoric he seemed to relish delivering in campaign speeches. As a meme that went around Facebook recently stated, I found that many of my family, friends, and acquaintances — some of whom I’ve known since childhood — have become people that I wouldn’t tell where Anne Frank was hiding.

As someone who is easily paralyzed by an overload of empathy for the unfortunate and/or downtrodden, this was absolutely horrifying. Just how can these people — at the lowest possible level — find it so easy to disregard/downplay the dehumanizing way Trump and his surrogates talked about such a large percentage of the population? Worse still, what about those who understood and were actively cheering him on? The ones who know his history in regards to fraud and behavior to women? I like to joke about the feelings of nihilism and misanthropy I occasionally experience in response to the world around me, but these people have done nothing but intensify those negative reactions and make them more frequent.

Let me be clear: I absolutely detest feeling that way.

I try my best to understand that most of them have been brainwashed by the decades-long crusade by America’s right-wing to paint liberals as deceitful, traitorous communists who actually hate America and want to destroy it. They’re easy enough to pick out. They’re the ones who go on about how Kamala Harris’s planned socialist policies will destroy America, but they can’t actually name a single classically socialist policy she has advocated. They’re the ones were derogatorily use the label woke, but cannot actually define what it means. But, they are not to be confused with the middle-aged or older white, cis hetero males driving nice cars emblazoned with “Don’t Tread on Me” paraphernalia. To them, I just need to state, “Sweetie, no one is treading on you.”

The worst part is even if the polling is utterly skewed and by the end of tonight it’s obvious that Harris has been elected President, the Trump for President trilogy still isn’t over. Much like the film adaptation of The Return of the King, the final installment of this three-part horror tragedy is going to include numerous codas. Trump and his supporters are going to do everything they can to subvert the results in an effort to put him back in the White House. Furthermore, as made abundantly clear on Jan. 6, 2021, he has plenty of followers who will engage in 2nd Amendment solutions when they don’t like the way an election has ended.

That’s the best case scenario. Don’t get me started on the other ways this Wonka-esque chocolate factory of a boat-ride ends.

With all that, in addition to all the insanity that has been this past election season, it seems Sally and I decided several days ago to skip watching the election returns tonight. The most likely outcome for this evening is the same one that we experienced four years ago: that we won’t know the winner for another few days. I haven’t forgotten the way I sobbed with relief the morning that all the news organizations starting calling the election for Biden. Truth be told, there will almost certainly be tears when the election is called — I’m just hoping that they’re for a good reason. Regardless of when the tears come, there just doesn’t seem to be any point in watching the major news organizations obsess over the returns on a microlevel.

No, far better to instead allow tonight to be anxiety-free and be able, no matter what, to get a good night’s sleep. If the news is bad tomorrow morning, then at least we’ll have had a full day to absorb and deal with the news before going to bed tomorrow night. It’s the kind of news that you can afford to wait to learn. This is much preferable to being utterly demoralized just before trying to get to sleep.

If the news is good, awesome, but even then, we’re still a far way from done with this grotesque political trilogy.