I think you're gonna make it, Neil.

I have no idea what to write about.  Most of the topics coming to mind are things that I want to complain about.  I don’t really feel like complaining though.  I don’t feel like whining about the playlist where I work.  I don’t want to complain about the fact that it’s a 40 minute musical loop that only changes once a month.  I don’t wish to bemoan the fact that this means that in a given month I have to hear each song on the playlist almost 2,500 times.  The last time that I heard the same song that many times in one month was when Sara Renee discovered Garth Brooks’s “Friends in Low Places”.

I’ve actually come to the point that I dread the playlist including a song that I like, because hearing any song that many times is enough to make you want to insert a pencil very deep into your ear canal.  This month the song that I dread learning to hate is Neil Young’s “Old Man”.  

Neil’s got a fighting chance though. There’s plenty of shit to draw my ire this month. For instance, I’m not sure that I can hear the Byrds sing “Hey Mr. Tambourine Man” over 2,000 times in a month without burning the building down.

But I may be driven to something far more dramatic than arson by this month’s inclusion of three different John Mayer songs.  THREE! THREE!!!  I am not exaggerating when I say that I’m actually trembling with rage at this moment.  It took me a while to get myself worked up to that point, but I started this paragraph and got so angry that I had to leave the room and get a piece of nicotine gum.  

Someone gets paid 15 times what I get paid, and all they have to do is generate a twelve song playlist every month.  That person put three songs by the same artist on a mixed cd.  Eleven year old girls do that.  My sanity is in the hands of this person, and this person obviously does... not... give... a... crap.

Lots of people love John Mayer.  I’m fine with that.  What people do in the privacy of their own bedrooms is their business.  I just don’t want it flaunted in my face.  I don’t want to have to explain it to my kids (if I ever have them.  Although, I can’t say that I feel comfortable bringing innocent children into a world populated by John Mayer fans).

Standard disclaimer: John Mayer is a talented musician and a funny guy, blah, blah, blah, blah.  He’s a very talented guy who creates things that don’t interest me.  Maybe he wouldn’t have vocal chord nodules if he didn’t spend all of his time running through the halls of his high school screaming at the top of his lungs.  It’s only a matter of time before running on those hard floors destroys his knees.  That’s one of the THREE songs on the playlist, by the way.

Also making an appearance on the playlist is “Daughters.”  On the surface, this is a sweet song, but only on the surface.  What’s your motivation to write this song, Johnny?  I think I know. It’s just one more step toward luring every girl with daddy issues into your bed, which I assume is some kind of fancy, sleep number deal with red satin sheets and bedposts that have to be replaced every other month due to heavy notching.

I think you’re gonna make it, Neil.  I think you’re gonna make it.

an embarrassing story

Last Thursday night, I cried during an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. I don’t mean that I laughed so hard that I cried. I cried because of song.

I’m not easily moved to tears. I’ve only cried because of a movie twice: Once in E.T. when Elliott is crying and then E.T. comes back to life, and he starts laughing but has to pretend he’s still crying; and once in Saving Private Ryan when Tom Hanks says, “Earn this”, and they cut to the old man asking his wife if he’s a good man, if he’s lived a good life. This particular song is the only song that has ever made me well up.

The song that made me cry while watching It’s Always Sunny is a song that I have heard literally hundreds of times, but the crying is a recent development. The crying started unexpectedly about a year ago. I was driving around Cleveland in my car and the song came on the radio. I was singing along until midway through the third verse and the next thing I new, I was pulling over because I was crying so hard that I couldn’t see the road. Then it happened again when I heard the song THE NEXT DAY. I couldn’t believe it. I have no personal associations with this particular song. It doesn’t trigger a specific memory, yet there I was in my car, weeping, to Thin Lizzy’s The Boys are Back in Town. Really. I was struggling with depression a little bit at the time, so I just thought that it was a weird funny coincidence. I even told a couple of people about it, but basically I had forgotten about it until about three months ago.

I was sitting in a Cheeseburger Charley’s in Nashville. The only other people in the restaurant were two Nashville Metro cops. I was enjoying a Beefalo burger with red onion, jalapeno, and spicy brown mustard, when I heard that familiar opening riff. And I thought, “Uh-Oh”. But I kind of laughed, and thought, there’s no way. Right? So I’m eating, and I’m listening to the song. Man, that song. That lyrical Irish vocal delivery style. The way the guitars stroke on the off-beat... and I’m crying. I throw away half a burger and rush out to my car.

I don’t really know why it makes me cry. It makes me feel nostalgic in a non-specific kind of way. Combine that with perfect pop rock hooks and i’m reduced to a blubbering mess. So when The Boys are Back in Town started playing during last week’s episode of It’s Always Sunny, I laughed, because I knew EXACTLY what was coming.

I Need a Job. Here's a Cover Letter.

Cover Letter

To whom it may concern,

I am an individual with a background in teaching, human resources, and retail management seeking employment in a field that will provide me with new challenges, as well as opportunities to engage my creative abilities.

There are a few things that you should know about me. I did not move to Nashville to pursue my musical dreams. This benefits you as a prospective employer in several ways. I will never ask you or any of my fellow employees to come see my terrible band play. I will never ask you for time off to go on a “summer tour”. I will never make flyers for an artist showcase on a company copy machine, nor will I leave said flyers on company bulletin boards or strewn about company break room tables.

I have an exhaustive knowledge of film and television. Some have called it nauseating.

I can recite the alphabet backwards.

I can type 60 words per minute. 65 if the wind is at my back.

SIGNIFICANT ACCOMPLISHMENTS:

I once won a spelling bee. I think that that was 4th grade.

National Honors Society-- inducted spring 1997

SAT scores-- 720 math, 720 verbal

Centennial Scholar-- Lee University

Kappa Lambda Iota-- History Club, treasurer-- Fall 2003

Semester in Cambridge Study program-- selected for Spring 2003

Phi Alpha Theta-- National History Honors Society, inducted Fall 2003

Completed Masters Thesis titled “Driving a Pinto with a Mustang in the Garage: Exploring Issues of Underachievement.”-- Summer 2005

INSIGNIFICANT ACCOMPLISHMENTS

First customer ever at the Taco Bell on Keith St. in Cleveland, TN (after they tore it down and rebuilt it).

Achieved life goal at the tender age of 23, when I stayed alive long enough to see the Boston Red Sox win a World Series.

Assistant Editor/Columnist, Target Tyrone Times, co-authoring the piece “Preparation H: The ‘H’ is for Hurricane”.

Holder of 5 of 6 first place spots on the trivia machine on the bar at Beef O’Brady’s, Cleveland, TN. I just couldn’t crack the food and wine category.

Please take a look at my attached resume and feel free to read some of my writing samples at http://tylereperron.blogspot.com/

Wind Energy

WIND ENERGY

Today I was thinking about (why not?) wind energy. I think we’ve probably all been thinking about alternative energy lately, even if we are the kinds of people who don’t own a pair of sandals and wouldn’t eat anything made by Kashi unless ordered to do so by a deeply concerned physician. We are thinking about alternative energy because there is currently an oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico that is roughly the size of Kansas. I personally am not comfortable with anything being roughly the size of Kansas, but let’s leave my proposed legislation for the annexation of eastern Kansas by Missouri out of the discussion for a moment.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking about wind energy. If we set aside foreign policy and economic difficulties tangled up in our dependance on foreign oil, the chief concern with fossil fuel usage is environmental impact. Ok. So we want a cleaner alternative that will minimize the effect that we as humans have on an environment that we depend upon for survival. We don’t want to contaminate the air or water. So...wind turbines. We have wind. We use that wind to spin the turbines and generate electricity without burning anything. THAT SOUNDS AWESOME!

Wait...

My understanding of physics is a bit rudimentary (I have seen Sir Isaac Newton’s dormitory room at Cambridge. Surprisingly messy), but if the wind is spinning the turbines, the wind is losing that energy (kinetic energy that is. I understand that the turbines are not skimming electrons out of the air). So has anyone studied what a large scale wind energy program designed to power a significant area (say roughly the size of New West Missouri) might do to weather patterns? If we attempted a wind energy program on a national scale, could we potentially screw with the weather? Could we cause widespread flooding, hurricanes, tornados? What about ocean breezes that cool and warm our land masses?

Had you even thought about it?

Well now that you have, I’d like you to sign this petition for the reduction of our wind footprint, beginning with the immediate removal of all wind-chimes located on or around Beech Ave, Nashville, TN.

Thank you for your time. Now I’m going back to sleep.

Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp

I don’t even own a guitar cable. I have two guitars (with 11 strings), neither of which currently work. One of them is an Epiphone Les Paul Custom, alpine white with gold hardware. It was my first guitar. My other guitar is a Music Man Axis Super Sport (the one with the fixed bridge, none of that Floyd Rose crap), red flame-top with a birdseye-maple neck. My amp is a Fender Hot Rod Deville, 4x10” that is missing both its cover and its footswitch.

I use the amp as an end table.

It’s funny to me that I used to want to be a rockstar. I started playing in bands when I was 15 years old. It was the late 90’s so most of the kids who were playing music were in punk (because it’s easy to play when you can’t really play) or ska bands (which were really punk bands that raided their high school marching band when Reel Big Fish and the Bosstones got huge for half a minute).

I quit my band when I relocated for college. Having grown up in central Florida, I played an awful lot of shows with bands that have gone on to make quite a good living making music, and when I’m feeling particularly diluted, I allow myself to wonder what could have happened if I had stayed at home and really pursued music. If I’m being honest I know that it wouldn’t have worked out for me because, frankly I was never that good.

I didn’t give up on music right away when I got to college, but putting a band together and keeping it together proved to be difficult at a small school. There’s too much turnover of personnel. My most successful endeavor lasted a mere four months until one member moved to Montana, one member moved to North Carolina, one member moved to Florida, and one member moved to Virginia. Really.

When playing music ceased being a viable option, I briefly considered learning to be a studio engineer, but instead opted to go to graduate school to be a teacher (ha!). After grad school, I spent two years in retail management back home in Florida, before moving back to my college town (as if retracing my steps in an effort to find something that I had lost).

Eight months after making the move, I found myself still working in retail management and in desperate need of a vacation. When most people think about vacation, they picture beaches or mountains or cruises or Branson, Missouri, but I went the other way. I booked a week at First Street Studio, conveniently located beneath my loft apartment, and sat in the dark for a week arguing about guitar tone and drinking Natural Ice until I convinced myself that I could sing (kind of).

I’d love to say that the experience was therapeutic or cathartic, but really, it was just fun. It was like rock and roll fantasy camp. I didn’t do anything but play, sing, drink beer, smoke cigarettes, and eat bad food. I think that I actually had more fun that week than I ever had playing music when I was younger, probably because I no longer possessed any real musical aspirations.

I may never play music in front of people again, and I’m ok with that.

Really.

But if I did... I think that the absence of pressure associated with the desire to succeed, or make headway, or get noticed by the “right people” would make the experience far more enjoyable. Maybe I need a little rock and roll fantasy camp in my life all the time.

Anyway, if you’re interested in hearing the finished product from that vacation, you can listen to it at myspace.com/duskatdusk

Warts and all.

I promise you nothing.

My passion. My secret shame. My movie collection.

My passion. My secret shame. My movie collection.

I started buying movies in 1999, when I was a freshman in college. My roommate and I had two TVs. There was no cable in the dorm rooms but I had a 13” with a decent antenna, so we got to watch Conan (O’Brien, not the Barbarian) every night. The 13” sat on top of Travis’s larger TV which we hooked to my VCR. It’s hard to believe that at one point I was buying new movies on VHS at Walmart at twenty bucks a pop. I hadn’t seen many R-rated films as a kid. My parents were strict about the kinds of things that we were allowed to watch (a fact that I do not resent. In fact, I’ll probably be just as strict with my children, if I ever have any; although, I have no idea what i’m going to do with my movie collection when and if I ever do have kids.)

The great thing about not having seen much is that if you set out to see all of the great films that everyone should see, you get to experience a continuous string of the kinds of highs that you feel when you see a great film. This experience for me reached its peak in 2004/2005 when I was in grad school. It was during that time that I discovered both Netflix and the monstrous collection of VHS at the Cleveland (TN) public library. At this time I was watching two to four new movies every day.

I never really intended to become a movie collector. I had been purchasing movies for six or seven years and had somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 films when I finished grad school. Then one day I stumbled across a Movie Stop that was liquidating its VHS inventory at a rate of 5 for $3. I’m not proud of what I did that day. I started walking up and down the alphabetized racks and saw movie after movie that I loved, at prices that I couldn’t pass up. By the time I hit the letter “C”, my arms were too full to carry any more. I went to the counter and asked if they had carts. They handed me a basket. I filled it and asked for another. I bought over 120 movies that day. I almost felt that I need to rescue them. They were like cute dogs at the pound, except they were all films to which I had already established an emotional attachment.

I’m going to pause for a minute and give you some of the statistics.

Total films that I own: 579

On DVD: 332

--This includes:

Two copies of Shaun of the Dead (I started watching it with a friend who hadn’t seen it and my first copy froze, so I went and bought another so we could finish).

One copy of the Sting: Special Edition (I hope to get this back from Lucas, but I won’t take it back until he watches it.)

One empty box that contained my criterion collection copy of Rushmore which has inexplicably disappeared. This is the second copy of Rushmore that I have lost. The other copy was on VHS and was stolen from my freshman dorm room.

On VHS: 237

The first thing that anybody says when they see my collection is, “Wow, that’s a lot of VHS!” I’ve replaced some of them, but I can’t really afford to replace them all. Maybe some day.

On Blu-ray: 10

I just got a player this Christmas. I’m a fan.

I also own two TV mini series:

John Adams on Blu-ray. You should see it if you haven’t.

Ken Burns baseball on DVD. It’s 18 hours long, and I watch it once a year, in April.

Then there’s the TV series on DVD: 87 seasons on DVD, plus 6 on my computer from iTunes.

This is starting to get upsetting.

Here’s a short statistical breakdown of the movies that I own.

Best Picture Oscar Winners: 39

Hitchcock films: 4 (plus the box for Psycho. I bought it at a Blockbuster closing and was upset to find that it contained the Gus Van Sant remake.)

Woody Allen films: 12

Tom Hanks films: 14

Jack Nicholson films: 13

Coen Brothers films: 11

Philip Seymour Hoffman films: 17

Spielberg: 13

Scorsese: 10

Bill Murray: 15

Kevin Bacon: 5 (?!)

I also own 44 movies that I have not seen.

I don’t really know why I’m so obsessive about movies. I think that maybe it’s just the collecting that I love. Everybody needs a hobby, right? I do love movies, but I never really had a burning desire to make movies (although the ideas of writing and/or acting do appeal to me). I don’t think that I’m visually oriented enough to direct. I don’t know if I’d be a decent film critic, because while I do enjoy analyzing and comparing films, I think that being forced to pick them apart would take most of the enjoyment out of it for me.

Yes, I do read books.

Anyway, if anyone has any questions about my collection, I’m more than willing to answer. If you want a recommendation, I’ll give that too, but as always...

I promise you nothing.

This is not a review of Hot Tub Time Machine.

This is not a review of “Hot Tub Time Machine.”

I’m a sucker for a title (not like viscount or marquis). I will eagerly throw hard-earned money at a book, film, or album on the basis of a clever title.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. “Hot Tub Time Machine” is simply the most recent example, but as soon as I heard about this movie, I knew that I had to see it the first week. It was the same feeling that I had when I saw the book “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”. I purchased Zombies immediately. I honestly felt that the author deserved my fourteen bucks for the title alone (which works out, since the entire book is an extrapolation of the title joke. It’s not bad; it’s just a one note song, not that there isn’t an art to the beating of a dead horse. More on that another time).

Some of the other examples that immediately come to mind are “Snakes on a Plane”, which might be the coolest name for a film to ever come out of the studio system and crush millions of people with disappointment; and “Harold and Kumar go to White Castle”, which succeeded in making me laugh really really hard at a stoner comedy, a genre that I typically despise (I’m told that this is probably due to the fact that I don’t smoke pot. I’m also told that smoking pot makes Dane Cook funny and the Doors listenable).

Now that I’ve alienated half of my audience...

So, why am I obsessed with clever titles? I think that it probably stems from a fear of failure. If I can hook an audience with a title, they may be more forgiving of the content between the covers. This is why I wrote a master’s thesis titled: “Driving a Pinto with a Mustang in the Garage: Exploring Issues of Underachievement.” You can’t hate a book like Christopher Moore’s “Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal”, nor would you want to. Even if it weren’t delightful and fun, it would get a pass on the strength of its title. Actually, Christopher Moore is a poor example, because the work that he does between the covers always lives up to the name printed on the spine (that sounded weirdly sexual).

For the record, I did enjoy Hot Tub Time Machine, and I will continue to spend my money on entertainment of its ilk. I need to save up as much Karma as I can until I unleash my own half-baked projects. I assure you that they will be cleverly titled. As for the content...

I promise you nothing.