jakit

The Fantastic Band

If I were in a band our name would be Fantastic.

With a moniker like that, everyone would naturally assume that our image would be a slick-sixties mod-thing with skinny suits and messy hair. But we wouldn’t look like that at all. Instead, we’d all dress like hoodlums from a Tin Tin book. That’d totally throw people off.

People would also think that with a name like Fantastic we would most definitely make hipster-pop music. Or they would think that since we were genre-bending that we would play weird avante-garde music. But we wouldn’t do anything like that. Nope.

What we would do is invent a completely new genre of music called Boxing Songs. The tunes would all sound like they should be played at a boxing match, with lots of emotional horns and heavy drums and stuff.

Every song would be exactly three minutes long; the length of a boxing round. We'd have lots of other really odd quirks, as well. For instance, we would only play shows during the daytime and when we played we would perform on the floor and have the audience stand on the stage.

What would be most super-cool about Fantastic, and secretly known only to our biggest fans, is that every song would include the word "fresh" and it would have to be rhymed with a different word each time.

I like my red beets fresh, like beat-master Jon Tesh

or

On the path to Gilgamesh, the dainty flowers smelled fresh

My sister would have to be our manager, of course. We would probably suck. But it’d be a lot of fun.

Good Feelings

It's a pretty good feeling to turn to your side and see a person there who you positively know is the best possible choice in the entire world for who you want to be raising your bouncing baby boy. To know that there is no one else on Earth who could do it better and to be amazed every day to see the natural grace through which she goes about exposing junior to his beautiful new world. To know that your little guy is one blessed little chunk.

It's the kind of good feeling that can wash away the blues that come with a writing career that's taking it's own sweet time to take off. Or a pizza driver job that has lost it's outlaw shine. Or the stress of an empty bank account. Or any other number of things that a modern day dude can get down on himself about.

It's the same feeling that I had on my wedding day when I looked into the mirror and I said to myself, you know what old boy? You must be doing something right.

The iPhone is Evil

I used to love Apple, but I'm starting to see them as representing everything that is wrong with the modern world.

80 years ago people used to go to the picture show. They would spend 2-4 hours a week watching a motion picture in a movie theater. It was a nice escape and good, affordable entertainment for the working people.

Then came television. Now people had the picture show in their living room. As long as they were home, people could watch motion pictures as often as they liked. But what was once a nice healthy escape at 2-4 hours a week, became unhealthy escapism at 5-6 hours a day.

The ills that television has brought upon society are incalculable. In my opinion, only the automobile has had a more negative impact on the human race.

Now, with the iPhone, people have the damn picture show in their pocket. Now they don't even need to be home to participate in mindless escapism. They can do it anywhere.

If one believes the idea that technology and the internet will make us smarter, they need only look at all the teenagers with their heads hunched over their hand-held video games.

Damn Steve Jobs. He's a genius, but he's not fighting the good fight.