Will the cycle be unbroken?

And, what ho! Cycling season is upon me. It is time once again to walk the bike up the road to the Local Villiage Grumpy-Assed Bike Shoppe (Where Your Custom is Our Inconvenience) for a once-over before I jump into another summer of swallowing mosquitoes and getting flipped off by bus drivers. Woo! It doesn’t seem like it could have possibly been a year ago since I last did this, but it has. The first couple of rides of the cycling season are always so exhilarating. Look at me! I'm health conscious! Excercising at 7 in the morning! Whilst saving the environment! I deserve accolades! ACCOLADES! It gets old really quickly, though. Old, hot and uncomfortable. Old, hot, uncomfortable and worrying. I worry about the fact that I’ve had no major spills (excepting the time during my first cycling season when I was menaced by a man with a lawn mower). Everybody who cycles between towns has some kind of horror story about being chased down by crack-smokers or going head-over-handlebars into a pile of rocks or being side-swiped by traffic. I am shadowed, everywhere I huff and puff, by the overwhelming sense that I am due.

There is a gig tonight. It’s at the pub I don’t like, the boring one, but I feel as if I have to go, and it actually will be the first viable opportunity I’ve had to get a full evenings’ use out of the beautiful camera Bubba gave me for my birthday.

I’m all about positive negativity.

"He made the whole world sing, dance, have fun, dream, fall in love with his innate good humor and his music. Including China."

--Sorrentoradio.com

It's called "Flying the Flag" and I found it on Ebay.

My internet radio station turns into hair metal after 1:30 PM because I'm pretty sure that's when the guy wakes up, goes down to his basement and starts making it all about his lost youth. Right now, I’m being subjected to “Bringing On The Heartbreak” by Def Leppard, but I'm tired and I just can’t be bothered to perform the complex operation of expansions and contractions that would be required to take my earphones out.

Sheesh…KROKUS? Were they even a band? I thought they were just a bad dream I had when I was twelve and fell asleep watching Headbanger’s Ball when it was hosted by Adam Curry. This is like The Scorpions meets Foreigner over at Tom Jones’ house and yet, YET, I still can’t seem to gather the strength to rip the offending appendages from my ear canals. This station is such a different animal in the morning. “Seasons” by Dave Mason followed by “Lovin’ You” by Minnie Riperton followed by “Never Been Any Reason” by Head East followed by “Ah Leah” by Donnie Iris followed by “Dreamweaver” by Gary Wright followed by “Home Tonight” by Boston followed by “I Love You” by Climax Blues Band and really, that’s about as close to perfect as a radio station can get. “I Love You” by the Climax Blues Band ALONE is worth every sullen moment I've ever had in life, and if you think I'm going to be embarrassed about loving it or owning the album on vinyl or slow-dancing with my pillow to it, then you obviously aren't familiar the ridicule-withstanding capacity I have when it comes to embarrassing music.

All right, that does it. I draw the line at Guns ‘n’ Roses “I Used To Love Her”. The earphones are coming out. So long, internet radio station out of Madison, Wisconsin. See your automated DJ, who has better taste in music than your human DJs, tomorrow morning, at which time I expect to be showered with heavy doses of semi-categorizable late-seventies weirdness that was probably forgotten for a very good reason…a reason that is clearly lost on me because I think it rules.

It's almost like livin' a dream.

Plum

These sort of afternoons make me feel so willfully twisted, like the universe trying to point me in the right direction but I keep on buying diet Cokes and having a desk job. And I always picture “The Universe” as a Daddy/God with a long white beard, but instead of robes, he’s got on a Hog Papa t-shirt and is holding a bottle of schlivovitz.

Breve

I shall dwarf the brilliance of every other blog ever written in the history of the Universe with my witty, perceptive, socially relevant observational banter! I'll only admit being a tool for pop culture if it makes me seem retro (my favorite Golden Girl is Rose!) and/or cool (my favorite type of music is obscure 1960's garage psyche!) I'll only post pictures of myself that are high-contrast and so flattering that you can barely tell it's a person!

Maybe I give up.

We'll see.