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nervous pseudoeuphoria
Tuesday, March 17 2009
I took some pseudoephedrine today to help me with crunch week of a web project (a rare and beautiful thing in this economy, so long as the check clears). I was peaking on its jolt of nervous pseudoeuphoria when Gretchen came rolling in with our accursed hatchback. It had a brand new grey inspection sticker on its brand new window. Somehow that bucket of bolts had passed inspection. It was such an overwhelming blast of good news that I had to lie down on in the driveway.
At this time of year I find myself lying in the driveway a lot. Its dark surface picks up lots of solar heat, and when the air is just a little too cold the outdoor experience feels absolutely perfect when you're lying on your back in the driveway. I'm not the only one who thinks this; on some sunny days in this season there are so many cats and dogs lying out there it looks like a roadkill clusterfuck.
We'd arranged the installation of a new window in our Subaru, and after we dropped it off at Excel Glass in Lake Katrine, we went to Rolling Rock, one of our favorite downscale restaurants (it's in the Mid Hudson Valley Mall). We had our usual meal of veggie burgers and fries. I also had my usual drink, a margarita.
Back at the house, we watched another two hour episode of American Idol. It was country week, and Adam, the gay gothy guy from Hollywood (whose sculpted hair makes it difficult for Gretchen to look at him) was having trouble figuring out what to do, since country really isn't his thing. So he went with a crazy Jeff Buckley interpretation of "Ring of Fire." Though the arrangement wasn't actually all that great, it was wild and crazy, with sitars and other exotic trappings. And it provided a perfect showcase of Adam's incredible voice, which proved so infinitely flexible in this song that it reminded me of my first impression of the liquid metal killer robot in Terminator II. Simon, the judge people love to hate, found the performance dreadful and self-indulgent, but he came off as a stick in the mud, someone railing against the music of young people today that "just sounds like noise." To his credit, Randy, the judge who once played bass with Journey, seemed to agree with this view, saying Adam's performance was "current, ...young, ...fresh, ...hot." After sitting through so much blandly mainstream music, it was refreshing to see something so genuinely weird on this show.
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