Sam’s Critique Corner: Beastie Boys “Check Your Head”

July 28th, 2010
Check Your Head

Check Your Head

Upon the release of their massively successful 1986 debut album, the Beasties were raunchy frat boy-meets-B-boys playing punk & metal with rap clothing on top. With 1989’s Paul’s Boutique, they defied notions of them as a bunch of obnoxious punks with its stunningly ambitious tapestry of psychedelic sampling & found sound, creating in the process their undoubted masterpiece. The third time around in 1992, as the Gen-X audience raised on Licensed to Ill in ‘86 turned college-aged, they had reinvented themselves yet again as a much  funkier, Meters-inspired alt-rock groove band, although rap wasn’t abandoned and they had created a gumbo stew of hip-hop, hardcore punk, trashy 80’s arena metal, hard rock, soul jazz and the hardest, dirtiest funk around in ‘92. They reverted to playing their own instruments, as opposed to the heavily hip-hop based Paul’s Boutique in which the samples, true to the purest of hip-hop, constructed the album rather than actual played instruments, but rather than going back to their humorous, all-aggro era of the mid-80’s they not only have turned here into an intelligent, wittily funny yet still serious funk-rock band, but they also even take time out to revisit their hardcore past with the Black Flag/Bad Brains/Minor Threat pastiche “Time for Livin’”. In doing this on Check Your Head, the Beasties have arguably crafted a far more impressive album than its predecessors in terms of sheer stylistic diversity and sustained power, depending on who you’re talking to, as they move from soul-jazz mambo instrumentals to heavy rockers to intelligent yet still streetwise New York rap over twenty tracks and less than an hour in length. They sample everything from the opening announcement for Cheap Trick’s “Surrender” on their live album At Budokan to open things up on “Jimmy James”, to their sampling of a bit of stage banter from a bootleg of a 1986 performance by the black metal band Venom, to sampling Bob Dylan’s “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” towards the end of “Finger Lickin’ Good” whilst sampling 5th Dimension’s “Aquarius” and Sly & the Family Stone’s “Dance to the Music” in that very same song, and sampling Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks” alongside a sample from Big Daddy Kane & Biz Markie’s “Just Rhyming With Biz” on “So What’cha Want”. Pooling together all their disparate influences into a cohesive, distinctive sound all their own that no one in rock or rap had the guts to attempt in the early 90’s, simultaneously bringing in a newfound political consciousness to go along with all of it, Check Your Head is a perfect finale to the Beastie Boys’ trio of mostly perfect albums.

  1. Release Date: 1992
  2. Rating:

TRACK PICKS: “Jimmy James”; “Pass the Mic”; “Finger Lickin’ Good”; “So What’cha Want”

Sam’s Critique Corner: Hüsker Dü “Warehouse: Songs and Stories”

July 28th, 2010
Warehouse: Songs and Stories

Warehouse: Songs and Stories

With their days as the seminal underground SST favorites long behind them, their manager having committed suicide the night before a tour and being unable to attain much commercial recognition, Hüsker Dü had suggested a fuller, more pop-oriented production than their work with SST house producer Spot, starting with 1985’s Flip Your Wig, their last album with the label before moving to Warner Bros. in 1986, but with their 1987 farewell effort and double-LP Warehouse: Songs and Stories, they went all-out with a crisper sound for Grant Hart’s fast, ferocious & behemoth-like drums and less guitar distortion than with almost everything they’d done previously, bringing out the melodic side of Hüsker Dü far more blatantly and obviously than any other of their records, expanding on Flip Your Wig and Candy Apple Grey’s fine punk-pop and creating a huge 20-track double in the process. The split between Hart and Bob Mould had been obvious from New Day Rising onwards, but here, it’s gotten to the point where they’re writing their own songs for themselves despite being performed as a trio as usual; the tracklisting sometimes tends to go in a pattern: Mould song, Hart song, Mould song, Hart song, etc., although several times two Mould songs follow eachother in a row. They’re all delivered with the same passion, intensity and honesty that Hüsker Dü had so successfully harnessed as a trademark that countless bands would learn from over the years, regardless of who wrote what song: Mould damn-near arrives at power pop with “Standing in the Rain” and “Could You Be the One?”, while Hart shows his more eccentric side with the alternative sea shanty “She Floated Away”, while later on Mould tries singer-songwriterism for the first time with “No Reservations” & “It’s Not Peculiar”, particularly on the former, pointing the way to his folk-inspired solo career that began in 1989 with Workbook. This set exhausts everything Hüsker Dü had to offer, as well as every one of their strengths, despite the absence of their other double-LP, 1984’s Zen Arcade’s sprawling, epic construction & stylistic shifts, or for that matter New Day Rising’s sheer ferocity. As such, despite the messiness of their breakup, Warehouse was a fine, brilliant end to the career of one of the most important bands of the 80’s, not to mention pointing the way to the alternative rock that would dominate the mainstream airwaves in five years’ time.

  1. Release Date: 1987
  2. Rating:

TRACK PICKS: “Standing in the Rain”; “Could You Be the One?”; “She Floated Away”; “It’s Not Peculiar”

Sam’s Critique Corner: P.M. Dawn “Of the Heart, Of the Soul and Of the Cross: The Utopian Experience”

July 27th, 2010
Of the Heart, Of the Soul and Of the Cross: The Utopian Experience

Of the Heart, Of the Soul and Of the Cross: The Utopian Experience

From its grandiose title to song titles such as “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss”, “To Serenade a Rainbow” and “In the Presence of Mirrors”, P.M. Dawn’s 1991 debut makes a convincing case that they, not De La Soul, were the true ‘hippies of hip-hop’. Their philosophy, dripping in new age spirituality, had little to no appeal to the often lyrically nihilistic hardcore rap audience with little to no street cred, not to mention their blatant R&B/rap fusion that couldn’t be clearer, especially when they sample Spandau Ballet on “Memory Bliss”, which became an unforgettably ethereal, smooth & romantic #1 hit in the fall of ‘91. Of the Heart, Of the Soul and Of the Cross may not have been welcomed with open arms in the hip-hop community, in the midst of gangsta rap especially, but it was one of the decade’s finest rap crossover hits, if not the absolute finest above all, seemingly creating its own sort of psychedelic soul-rap, cloaking their hybrid of hip-hop & R&B in a spiritual & philosophical context that recalled that of both the 1960’s and the music of peak-era Stevie Wonder. This is hip-hop for peace & love, equality, brotherhood and good times, whether Arsenio Hall wants to call anyone the ‘hippies of hip-hop’ or not. Of course, it doesn’t stick to one formula, as the hip-house of “Shake” proves, or the techno-inflected “On a Clear Day”, or the epic closer “The Beautiful”, which sounds almost like P.M. Dawn’s response to The Smiths’ “How Soon is Now?” with it’s funky guitar backing, psychedelic perceptive lens and menacing dancefloor thump, not to mention the poetic, profound lyrics, which are spoken rather than rapped or sung. This may be rap fit for playing during a joint-passing session, but it doesn’t date itself with hokey, preachy cliches, as did such later ‘hippie-hoppers’ as Arrested Development; instead, The Utopian Experience gets by on the sheer mastery of craft shown here, and it stands as an achievement the group (or, perhaps, most of the other conscious, peace-loving alt-rap groups of the 90’s) were never able to equal or top.

  1. Release Date: 1991
  2. Rating:

TRACK PICKS: “Paper Doll”; “In the Presence of Mirrors”; “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss”; “The Beautiful”

Word to the World: Political correctness doesn’t even exist.

July 27th, 2010

Of all the incessantly repeated, self-parodying slogans used by Republicans today, perhaps no single line is stupider than the assertion that ‘political correctness’ has struck again in some situation. Well, there’s no reason to side with the so-called ‘politically correct’ no more than there is to side with the conservatives, because this alleged liberal fascist movement doesn’t even exist.

That’s right. There is no movement trying to ban every term that isn’t under some sort of hippie guideline to living. There may be people who want you to stop saying ‘retarded’ or ‘that’s so gay’, just as there was an effort in decades past to phase out terms like ‘n*gger’ & ‘negro’, which is all fine and good, but as far as I am aware there never was a major movement to get rid of terms like ‘fireman’, ‘blind’ or anything along those lines, as George H.W. Bush alleged there was in 1991. The only reason people say ‘Native American’ instead of ‘Indian’ for those called that, but not actually from India, is because calling them Indian would be incredibly inaccurate now that we know they never came from India. It may never have had anything to do with the term being offensive at all.

To further prove that it doesn’t exist, let’s go back and see where its usage first dates to: none other than the Daily Mail, right at the height of Margaret Thatcher’s administration in 1986. The snooty editors decided it would help to further absurdly demonize liberals by calling them ‘liberal wackos’ doing away with the perceived offensiveness of the song “Baa Baa Black Sheep”, supposedly having it retitled “Baa Baa Rainbow Sheep” at a school for racial equality, or some such nonsense story along those lines. In reality, this was a complete fabrication; according to a teacher in the school, it was only retitled that to turn it into an action rhyming game, not because the term ‘black’ was somehow offensive to African-Americans. Why would they interpret it that way? The term in this context has absolutely nothing to do with race, rather the color of a sheep’s wool. Do these Daily Mail people think the rest of the world is stupid? Well, during the Thatcher years they apparently, arrogantly so, thought ‘the liberals’ were a bunch of tie-dyed hacky sack playing hippies, blissfully unaware of the ‘real problems’.

Fiendish as this complete lie was, it spread like wildfire in America at the dawn of the Bush administration in the late 80’s. People who just wanted some universal appeal or, God forbid, sensitivity, not to mention accuracy in their words, were branded ‘politically correct’, and in many cases they weren’t even in a sensitivity-minded situation, rather finding themselves branded that way by a press that picked up the Daily Mail’s idea to cook up a bunch of ridiculous myths. Nobody on the ‘politically correct’ side of things ever walked by the stupid banner at all; it was only ever used (and is, to this day, only ever used by dusty, sloganeering conservative wheezebags) by greedy politicians looking for votes & support. What were merely a few isolated incidents of either an attempt to be sensitive, an attempt to not conform to cliched terms, or just using different words, pretty much, became part of this so-called ‘movement’ in the eyes of the public.

Political correctness is a myth. Just because we ought to cut out insanely overused dumbass talk like ‘retarded’, ‘negro’, ‘gay’ in the insulting sense, etc. doesn’t mean anyone is going to really force you, unless certain terms are banned in a workplace or something like that. There’s no hippie SS who are gonna slap you & punish you if you say “that’s retarded” or “that’s so gay”, even if it makes those who use the words sound ignorant, bigoted and insensitive. Nobody is any sort of sensitivity fascist, for that matter. There is no sensitivity police. Nothing, nobody, nada, doesn’t exist, ain’t gonna happen anytime soon. Relax, offensive comedians, nobody can touch ya, especially and unfortunately not the all bark & no bite act of Denis Leary. I believe people should stop saying ‘retarded’ and ‘gay’, simply because it’s unintelligent and, if unintentionally, hateful talk. If some beautiful woman somewhere said ‘that’s so gay’, it wouldn’t make the word glamorous. Nothing can justify the words’ use. But am I going to stridently lecture you, the average guy in the street, about how it’s wrong to say this or that? No. No one is, unless they’re assholes about their own fine & good personal belief. And nobody is going to be imprisoning you in a concentration camp for the ‘politically incorrect’, replete with hippie prison guards with suede-denim suits leading you to some sort of organic poison gas chamber (as Jello Biafra humorously yet frighteningly sang about).

And for the conservatives who propagate this myth, we’d like to ask you to not blow things so far out of proportion as you’ve done for so long now, and start merely telling the truth. Stop making up stupidass stories about how ‘liberal wackos’ are supposedly out to destroy “family values” with their co-optation of the “gay agenda”. Or else we the sensible American people start telling true stories about how you were behind the “Freedom Fries” name change during the Iraq War.

And they’re calling the liberals overly sensitive with words? Hypocrites, hypocrites they are.

Sam’s Film Critique Corner: Stanley Kubrick “A Clockwork Orange (1971)”

July 27th, 2010
A Clockwork Orange (1971)

A Clockwork Orange (1971)

In this nightmarish yet garish future-shock classic, young ‘droog’ Alex’s interests include rape, ‘ultraviolence’ and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Early on, it’s a reckless, colorful and seemingly glamorized spree of hooliganism, from brutally beating a homeless man, to making cars crash by driving in their line of direction and forcing them to turn & crash into buildings, trees, et al, singing “Singin’ in the Rain” while preparing to gang rape a writer’s wife as the writer himself watches in horror, to raping two teenage record shop patrons by luring them to his bedroom. It’s a grotesquely colorful but brutal world in the then-upcoming year 1995, where teenage troublemakers seemingly have toppled the law in many areas, and A Clockwork Orange views the most violent or sexual scenes through Alex’s warped eyes: the rape of the two girls is shown with classical music in fast motion, rendering it almost disturbingly less disturbing than one might ascertain reading about it elsewhere, whilst the rape of the writer’s wife is never actually shown, and the gang’s destruction of the couple’s home comes off, disturbingly so, as just lads having their fun. This is one of the most challenging films ever released, not in that the scenes are as disturbing as they were forty years ago (long before Saw, Hostel, etc.), but in that it challenges anyone’s view of what kind of film they’re going to see; it defies any notion that it’s a shocker, but also defies that it’s merely dark satire and nothing more, bending conventions left and right in a manner that renders it viciously perceptive in its message, as well as absolutely jarring and disturbing in a way far different from any single scene cited in descriptions of its controversy. In fact, if one isn’t quite as utterly shocked and appalled as they might’ve thought, judging by its reputation, in this day & age it only drives the message and its satire into the ground; director Stanley Kubrick or Anthony Burgess would’ve found today’s onslaught of ultra-violent horror films & cartoonish violence elsewhere to be the ridiculous culmination of everything the book and film foretold, if they were still with us today. One might be expecting a visual terror, but in the end, as Alex goes through prison and rehabilitation through the ‘Ludovico technique’, losing free will in the process, there lies a far greater and more realistic terror: the disappearance of moral choice, with state-sponsored brainwashing in its place to render its citizens defenseless against the weight of the world.

  1. MPAA Rating: ‘R’ for Restricted (No One 17 or Under Accompanied Without a Guardian)
  2. Release Date: 1971
  3. Rating:

Sam’s Critique Corner: The La’s “The La’s”

July 27th, 2010
The Las

The La's

The La’s, led by notorious perfectionist Lee Mavers, were equal parts Stone Roses, The Smiths, The Beatles, The Who, The Kinks and The Byrds, filtering the latter five through the Roses’ neo-psychedelic dance-rock and creating music that seemed quite out of time and impossible to be tied to any era in particular. You can’t peg their debut as merely a pleasant 60’s revival, a jangle pop classic or pigeonhole it as anything else. It’s simply a classic modern British guitar pop album whose classicism predated that of the nascent Britpop movement by four years, despite Mavers’ going through multiple producers for their self-titled 1990 debut album and still being unsatisfied with the end result that came out. Fact is, even if Mavers didn’t get his ‘perfect sound’ (which is absolutely unnecessary for great music), he did help create some excellent sound nonetheless, spawning the international college radio hit “There She Goes”, which was so timeless and shamelessly melodic that it even crossed over into the US top 50 chart, not to mention going Top 20 in the UK. Indeed, a few moments like the length of the eight-minute closer “Looking Glass” weren’t quite necessary in hindsight, but that doesn’t stop the album from being a classic first outing, as well as the band’s only outing. But if they’d gone on recording, chances are they never would’ve topped this.

(P.S. this review originally appeared in a different version last night, but I accidentally deleted it. Hope you all like the new version if you liked the old one.)

  1. Release Date: 1990
  2. Rating:

TRACK PICKS: “Son of a Gun”; “I Can’t Sleep”; “There She Goes”

Sam’s Small World of Rock ‘n’ Roll: San Francisco’s Unsung Proto-Punk

July 27th, 2010

Jefferson_AirplaneSan Francisco, summer 1967. We the American public think of long-haired kids with flowers in their hair dancing in the grass, going to see Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, The Doors, Blue Cheer, et al. We think of this era as one totally separate from punk rock, which came a decade later, thinking of the two as unrelated enemies, who wouldn’t connect with eachother if doing so meant life or death. But the ‘Frisco rock scene, which included the aforementioned future mainstream stars, also included a number of bands like Moby Grape & Love who never attained significant commercial success, but who were just as important as the Jefferson Airplane, Joplin, The Doors and all the big names of the late 60’s in San Francisco. And one aspect of the scene which is rarely discussed in this cultural separation of punks & hippies is the fact that many of these bands, both mainstream and underground in their sound and attitude, predated punk in a number of ways. The Airplane’s “Somebody to Love” possesses a fiendish, mid-tempo attack that predated The Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.” by an entire decade. Moby Grape’s “Omaha”, frequently described rather accurately as “The Beatles on speed”, is a three-guitar onslaught that may’ve conveyed Californian values & hippie consciousness, but it simultaneously was much harder than The Beatles themselves, as well as most of the rock ‘n’ roll coming out in 1967, and it’s impossible not to cite it as proto-punk in that sense.

The_Doors_band_membersAnd then, when talking about proto-punk in California circa 1967, one inevitably arrives at The Doors, the most proto-punk of all these bands mentioned here. Jim Morrison was more confrontational than any other performer rock had ever seen beforehand, and one whose seductively terrifying power has rarely been matched since despite a wave of imitators, and it was ten years before John Lydon sneered at his audience & challenged them to think like they’d never thought before. They may’ve had a huge hit with “Light My Fire” and been, indeed, a commercial band at heart, but there was nothing else quite like the song on the radio, and there was nothing quite like their epochal self-titled 1967 debut out that year either. In retrospect, it’s actually rather surprising they got so much attention in their short existence, seeing as their music was far more cerebral, artier, more intense and far less compromising than anything else on the radio, on television or in the stacks of record shops in the 1960’s, except for such seldom-heard underground proto-punk bands as The Velvet Underground or The Stooges. If that ain’t punk according to you, the reader, than I don’t know what is.

It’s a small world for rock ‘n’ roll.

(P.S., this was originally posted in another version yesterday, but I accidentally deleted it! Hope you like the new version. I think it’s actually a bit better than the old one.)

Dear Journal: July 26th, 2010

July 26th, 2010

I admit, since I was feeling so good the last time I wrote, I’ve had some tiredness, frustration, et al. But things are still gonna be looking up: still got the foot surgery coming soon, still only one year left in this stuffy, god-forsaken apartment building, still more space on the Zune, still not much more of this hot, heat-exhausted summer left by this point. I went to bed in the 2:00 AM zone the last couple of nights, so the tiredness and occasional grumpiness is expected, but all I really need to do is stick it out until the end, put all that temporary, fleeting annoyance aside and remember that life is great. Better than a lot of other people’s lives, and most certainly better than being six feet under, which I’ve always known, really. I know I’m actually a lot more privileged at the end of the day than a lot of folks here in America at this point in time, even though to me it sometimes seems as if we somehow don’t have any money.

I can’t connect with the culture today; it’s all about how to follow the latest trends, how to fit into a narrow, boring-ass stereotype as defined by redundant television, how to be ‘popular’ (more like how to conform to what our corporate-dominated society dictates as being mandatory for all adolescents), how to be like other people want you to be, how to be what you’re not, how to act in strict obedience to whatever society throws at you. It’s training, basically, for a low-class existence where you work for hardly any money in the middle of a recession brought on by the sheer ineptitude of Republican politicians in dealing with the latest badly handled foreign war, if not going to fight in said badly handled overseas war. Anyone unable or unwilling to conform, anyone who’s weirdly cool, quirky or naturally freakish or different is in for a rough ride in this conformist modern society.

We have arguably reached the absolute nil of popular culture; it consists of that nauseatingly voiced Fred on YouTube (and now spreading further into the loftier realm of television with an appearance on the equally irritating iCarly), the ridiculously inane fairy-pop/”country” (not actual country, but a Nashville sheen and a countrified image) of Taylor Swift, the horrific hip-hop & emo hybrid of the scene kid, the atrocious ‘crunk’ subgenre of rap, the alarming increase in manufactured electro-pop, the higher-than-ever prevalence of plastic barbie doll fashion models, superficial good looks with no substance and emphasis on absolutely perfect physical appearance (especially for the poor young women of this sexist society). Pure guitar rock, jazz, folk, real country and so many other celebrated musical forms are being shut out in this influx of polished mainstream trash, even if they still exist in the underground.

As the higher awareness of indie rock over the last two decades and the enduring popularity of The Who, The Beatles, et al among our youth have shown, it’s not a nihilistic state of nowheresville for great new music; in fact, it’s almost better this way in that the commercialization of alternative rock is long behind us, with just a bunch of shitty, totally un-alternative, faux-anthemic post-grunge bands left in the fallout nearly twenty years after the systematic corporate influence on the alternative world became apparent. But I and so many others are still waiting for the next album with the same impact as Nevermind, Never Mind the Bollocks, Sgt. Pepper’s, The Ramones’ first album, London Calling, Who’s Next, Exile on Main St...if that will ever come. Hey, at least in the 2000’s we had The White Stripes & The Strokes with the twin high watermarks of Elephant and Is This It, respectively, right?

Sam’s Critique Corner: The Smiths “Meat is Murder (UK)”

July 25th, 2010
Meat is Murder

Meat is Murder

Riding the tidal wave of praise brought on by their monumental self-titled 1984 debut, The Smith’s sophomore effort, bearing the very obviously vegetarian-minded Meat is Murder, debuted at a surprising but somewhat expected #1, becoming their only album to reach that lofty position in their short career. But their only #1 album is also their weakest, especially in comparison with the twin landmarks of their debut and the following year’s The Queen is Dead, but not necessarily because the music is always inferior; its weaknesses are analyzed and realized only after listening to the whole thing from beginning to end, as Morrissey’s frequent descent into either terminally adolescent melodrama or, especially in the case of the failed, uninspired anti-meat rhetoric of the title track, an even blend of self-pity & protest, which is most certainly not what he has ever been suited best for. One can easily get the impression from the fine pseudo-rockabilly experiment “Rusholme Ruffians”, the dramatic yet energetic “Nowhere Fast” or the tense “Headmaster Ritual”, which come before the record’s weakest moments towards the end, that this is a great follow-up to a fantastic first outing, but when songs like the uneven “What She Said”, the almost disco-fied faux-funk (as played by contemporaries ABC) of the seven-minute, anti-capital punishment rant “Barbarism Begins at Home” or the overly cutesy-sounding “Well I Wonder” roll around, the flaws of Meat is Murder become readily apparent. It’s hard to tell whether or not it was a mistake for Sire, the band’s US label, to put the mini-masterpiece and American dance club hit of a single that is “How Soon is Now?” in the middle of the record (the middle? where did that idea come from?): as a plus, that’s one less six-plus minute song when listening to the original nine-track UK edition, as this reviewer did, which makes the pace seem much better without the grand total of three songs over the six minute line you’d have with it on there; on the other hand, when listening to the now-standard ten-track issue with the song, it also makes for a truly brilliant song on an album that has a few of The Smith’s great songs, but not enough of their brilliant classic singles, and perhaps boosts its credibility while making it easier to ignore the other two overwrought long numbers. As for the title track, which no doubt was intended by outspoken animal rights advocate Morrissey to be a revelation and a harbinger of change for carnivorous guys & gals ’round the world, it ends up being disappointingly trite, especially the monotonous refrain of some variant of “And *insert meat-related activity here* is MURDER!” throughout and unnecessary bookends of the simulated sounds of bovine cries & butcher’s blades. The message is fine, even if this reviewer personally doesn’t agree with it, but the overwrought performance and, almost sadly, overly melodramatic vocals by a singer known for lifting melodrama from terminal adolescence make it a failure and a self-absorbed protest that won’t be making most listeners turn vegan/vegetarian in this day & age, where we hear this sort of message all the time and have become numbed to it. And Morrissey’s overwrought vocalizing becomes a problem quite often, even at times on the great ballad “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore”, and that only further mars Meat is Murder. Aside from that, it’s a well-produced, all fine & good album, but it should have been as absolutely fantastic as it could’ve easily been.

  1. Release Date: 1985
  2. Rating:

TRACK PICKS: “The Headmaster Ritual”; “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore”; “Nowhere Fast”

Dear Journal: July 24th, 2010

July 24th, 2010

Everything seems to be looking up for me lately. Apologies for the nearly week-long absence, but in that time things have been getting better and better. The orthopedics appointment I’d previously seemed irritated at having to go to revealed that come September, these blighted feet are finally gonna get fixed. I’m gonna walk right, no waddle or slowpokedness anymore from yours truly. And I’m only gonna be in casts, wheelchairs, crutches & all that for 6-8 weeks. That’s right, before year’s end, you’re never, ever gonna see me walk funny, waddle laboriously or trail behind trying to keep up again. Plus, I’ve found a new way to put albums on my MP3 player so they won’t take up too much space, so I’m gonna have room for tons more music. And holy shit, do I love that MP3 player and the music on it. Another plus is, I’ve got just a year left in this apartment. Yet another plus, math & schoolwork in general isn’t going to be nearly the notorious pain it once was when I start doing it again, since I was diagnosed with a non-verbal learning disorder (which, by the way, is very much a misnomer seeing as this provides mostly benefits in the long-term, rather than harms) a month ago. All in all, things are f*cking great right now, absolutely amazing for my circumstance.

I got nothing to rant about right now. All I’m gonna say is this: I feel prepared, in some way or another, for just about anything in life. I feel ready to take on almost anything. I feel well and truly alive. Sam Windmill is ready for action, and has been loosed upon the land. World, take notice, goddamn it!