Archive for January, 2009

I haven’t discovered the right tea for angry moments. Or for fussy moments, vengeful moments, ornery moments, imperialistic moments, triumphant moments, conspiratorial moments, shameful moments, impulsive moments, enigmatic moments, vexing moments, challenging moments, or even those sinister gassy moments. This is too bad. As for Chamomile and its claim of calming effects for quiet moments, I’m skeptical. Quiet moments happen so rarely, Chamomile is practically doomed before it’s out the door. Then consider that if you are having a quiet moment, chances are you are already calm (hence the quiet) and have no need to be calmed further by a cup of tea. But if you did indeed have the need, it is quite likely that by the time you finished procuring a cup, brewing the tea and allowing it to cool enough to drink, that that fleeting quiet moment would be but a memory. You might then be very bored with being quiet, and ready to begin a loud activity like yelling or blending things in the blender. At which point you would come to the same saddening conclusion that I have – that there are just too many types of moments and not nearly enough matching teas.

Man. Sometimes you date a girl and all she wants to do is party.

You buy her champaign and roses and diamonds for her finger – the usual surefire methods of keeping a female companion satisfied – and what does she give in return? Some hotness in the bedroom? Some delicious home-cooked meals? A finely-knitted scarf? No. She just stays out all night. Partying.

Sometimes you go to the club just to see what she’s up to. Turns out she’s dancing and romancing with other guys. She also gives them all her number. This is unacceptable behavior given the expense of the aforementioned champaign and roses and diamonds.

Fortunately I usually have enough dough left over for some studio time. That way I can record a sweet song and air out my frustrations with a slick electronic beat and three guitars that don’t atually appear on the track. Word.

When former President George W. Bush travelled back to Texas today, he did so aboard something called Special Air Mission 28000. SAM 28k is actually the 747 otherwise known as Air Force One, but when you’re no longer the president they give it a special title for a day. Now I’m above cracking any short bus jokes at this point, but I’m not above pointing out that the picture above speaks volumes about the fundamental differences between the outgoing and incoming presidents.

I’ve experienced a sobering feeling amidst the excitement today. Obama is sweeping in to clean up messes, right wrongs. And boy oh boy are there messes. It’s as though the parents are returning home after a vacation and the kids have completely trashed the place. Thank goodness the new guy is competent. And thank goodness he’s a good orator. Obama’s words are steady, calming, full of presence, fatherly. They couldn’t contrast more sharply with his predecessor’s shifty, unthoughtful, uncomfortable-in-his-skin style of public speaking.

Seeing Bush arrive on the Capitol steps to boos was depressing. His presidency infuriated me more than I can say, but this still threw me. Ultimately, it is the office of the President being booed and, taken to its logical conclusion, the country of America booing itself. I don’t think any of us can feel good about that, regardless of how much we may have disliked the 43rd Commander-in-Chief.

Barack and his boy genius pulled few punches in their inaugural speech. Some of the crescendos were open condemnations of the policies of the man before him – the man who just happened to have an excellent seat to hear those crescendos cheered at his expense. I found myself wondering about the thoughts rolling around in W’s head. There were many times in the past eight years when I questioned if the guy was human or reptilian, and today was another of those. Does he feel bad? Could one man truly believe in so many craptacular ideas? Does he honestly think the world turned for the better under his watch? I could never and still cannot figure him. He seemed like an imposter when he arrived in 2000, and in the huge shadow of Barack Obama these past few weeks, he very nearly disappeared. But today, as he limped out of Washington - when I thought I would be slappin’ high fives and eating bacon sandwiches - I couldn’t stop puzzling over what exactly was going on inside Bush’s brain all these years.