This week has been a weather rollercoaster of light snow, rain, and sun with freezing temps one day, spring-like temps the next, and snow amounts varying between our home near town and the trails out in the country before finally melting.
Despite these minor curveballs, I continued to hike on through the woods like the lumbering oaf I am, and got my weekly 30-mile goal after a quick sunrise hike on Sunday morning before Tottenham played.
The pics today are from over the past week. I threw in a phone pic of Lola looking like extra chunk in her Holiday sweater and my new food obsession– the crispy air-fried chicken breast sandwich, because why not.
Later.
THE SOILED SOUNDS TRACK OF THE POST
This isn’t so much a recommendation as it is a bit of an essay/long-winded thought.
I’m sure you can tell from my writings that I was a shit student. I have no doubt that I had/have a twist of ADHD, depression, and Dog knows what else, but going to high school in the late 80s meant that the guidance counselor was less of a counselor and more of a gym teacher/JV basketball coach with nothing to do with support other than passing out jockstraps.
I was uninterested in anything but getting a laugh from friends, listening to music, and art, all while trying to make it through the day without someone making fun of the obese body I was hiding under the multiple t-shirts and button down I wore as layers of “protection” from random dudes grabbing my rolls and loudly humiliating me as I walked down halls of the small, piss poor Catholic “Christian” school I went to.
School offered me nothing but art class and emotional pain, but the music I was listening to offered everything, and I look back, knowing that the bulk of my “education” came through music.
Prog-rock Rush and mid-80s metal from bands like Iron Maiden turned me on to history and books I never would have never thought about reading, and since my grades weren’t good enough for any real high school literature class, I took my recommendations via songs written by Neil Peart or Steve Harris.
Other people are quite dreadful.
The only possible society is oneself.
― Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband
And 35+ years later, I still find myself giggling at lines in those plays! I also still find myself driving alone, singing “la, la, la, I’m a girl, and you’re a boy,” as if it’s the most normal thing in the world (It is, at least I hope).
Much of the music I dug was also shared among the group of kids I hung with in high school, a gang that included a gay kid (one of my best friends in high school and not out at the time; it was too difficult in the late 80s. I would pass my driver’s ed test in his parent’s car just because we were bored.); a kid that walked down the stairs sideways, was obsessed with porn and thought olives would make his dick bigger, a golf-obsessed Mötley Crüe fan, a lesbian (also not out at the time and a future usher at our wedding), and a handful of other creatives, metal heads, oddballs, and stoners.1
This gang helped me to become more open and accepting of people who were “different” because they were more accepting of me. While we never talked about it, there was no doubt that we shared similar bonds of anxiety and pain, and along with that, we shared similar tastes in music, although Craig never did get me to like Cher!
I look back at my formal education with little to no joy, but if I take a minute to think about the self-anointed “slackers” that I sat in the back of the lunch room talking about music and goofing off with, I am hard-pressed to think of an ill-word that was ever said about my weight or appearance.
This is all why, even as a middle-class white dude living in a cul-de -sac, I will always have a beef with “the man,” and have the backs of true, unmanufactured creatives and oddballs. And of course, I will always keep pursuing a “new favorite song,” and always keep expanding what mind I do have with new music and learning from it; it’s really all I know.
NOTE: I would like to add a few years after graduation, I reconnected with some old high school classmates, some smart ones I DIDN’T hang out with but were always friendly, and we became very good friends. Through those friendships, I was introduced to the woman who is now my wife of 26 years and counting, and also a woman who thankfully did NOT rely on music for her education!! The world is a funny old place when it’s not burning like a dumpster fire.