at the very peak of Urkelmania

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Who the hell are Munford and Sons?

There’s a reason i don’t know this. Even though the Nashville area is one of the “fastest-growing metropolitan areas in America,” there’s still a few things we don’t have that other places take for granted. We have no Trader Joe’s. Starbucks are few and far between. I’ve never seen a Chipotle. And there isn’t a radio station that plays hipster music…

…there are a few big country stations, of course. A few classic rock stations (Pink Floyd, Zeppelin, AC/DC.) There’s an easy-listening pop station for office people (Celine Dion, Madonna, Matchbox 20.) There’s a really crappy alternative station that plays nothing but sludgy nu-metal (Sevendust, Hinder, Papa Roach.) There’s an automatic DJ station that plays fairly decent random stuff (Green Day, Elton John, REM.) There’s a station that keeps crooning alive (Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Perry Como.) There’s an R&B station (Frank Ocean, John Legend, Rafael Saddiq), and then there’s 101.1 Tha Beat Jamz, which plays nothing but the newest, loudest, and worst rap music imaginable (Chris Brown, Nikki Minaj, Rick Ross.)

…but there isn’t a white hipster station. So i’ve never heard Munford and Sons, just like i never heard of Gotye until my brother asked me to download his album. Remember back in 2005 when everyone was complaining they they couldn’t go anywhere without hearing Deathcab for Cutie’s “Soul Meets Body?” I never heard it until my brother came back from his 3-month stint working in Seattle. The Arcade Fire. The White Stripes. Wilco. Interpol. The Kings of Leon. The Black Keys. Those bands just don’t get played around these parts. I read that Jack White has a house right down the road in Franklin where he lives near Nicole Kidman and Billy Ray Cyrus… i can see why he would want to live here, because almost nobody would recognize him.

The station that should be filling this void is 107.5 FM. Those call numbers still sound slightly magical to me. Back in the late ’80s, it was pretty much our link to the wider music world — since almost no one had MTV, it was the only outlet that played new music for people under the age of forty. Genesis. MC Hammer. Vanilla Ice. Whitesnake. Def Leppard. Whitney Houston. All spun by a Hawaiin-shirt-wearing cokehead DJ named “Coyote” McCloud and the Zoo Crew. Sounds pretty retro now, but back then, it was the future. The nightly Top Ten Countdown was required listening for nearly every kid in middle and high school. At 7:00 every night, we’d turn off TV’s and Ataris and turn on the radio, because goddamnit, at some point they’re going to play “The Humpty Dance” and i’m not going to miss that.

Good memories.

Sadly, 107.5 FM is now “The River” and all they play is Katy Perry. Seriously, all they play is Katy fucking Perry. And that chick that sounds like Katy Perry.

I know, i need to come into the future and get satellite radio or Pandora or whatever. But i haven’t yet, because i’m still up to my neck in CD’s. The next time i buy a new car, i’ll make the leap.

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Wow, so there’s gonna be a new Pope. Another one?

You know, the whole phenomenon of Catholic priest-pedophilia thing still intrigues and horrifies me. The seeming prevalance of it. It’s like if it came to light that Methodists are huge in the meth trade. I mean, what is the reason? I know priests aren’t allowed to smash so they have all this pent-up male jelly, but why wasn’t it a scandal of priests sleeping with hookers or seducing teenage girls? Why all the little boys? This is disturbing.

See, i always figured that attraction is a mix of genetics and psychological imprinting. If it were only genetics, then we’d all likely be attracted to healthy members of the same race. But that doesn’t happen. You might be an white male who really likes slender asian girls. Or a slender asian guy who likes tall, blonde American women. Or a black guy who really likes white chicks and doesn’t mess with black chicks. Or a girl who’s turned on by older Sean Connery-types. Or a white girl who likes black guys. Or a black girl who likes white guys. Or a gay dude who only likes superfit guys. Or a gay dude who likes fat hairy guys. Or the guy who wants the 500-pound girlfriend, or some real weirdo who only wants to bang handicapped midgets. It’s all a game of chance, depending on what you’re exposed to early in life, what makes an imprint on your psychosexual self…

…so, what sort of weird imprints to lifelong Catholics get? I keep thinking that as kids, they never saw a Playboy magazine without being beaten or shamed for it. And they spend their formative years… like…. surrounded by old, hideous, screeching nuns with wrinkly faces, and told to worship some naked dude on a Cross, surrounded by rosy-cheeked nude cherub Renaissance angels?

Is that it? Does that rewire their impulses for pedophilia?

I demand an experiment. I demand that an isolated Catholic school remove all their typical imagery, and replace it with material where all angels are depicted as hot, curvaceous young girls, and Jesus wears a robe and looks like Radagast, and all nuns must be of a minimum attractiveness level, and wear habits that are, if not revealing, then certainly more form-fitting and flattering than what they have now.

We must create a new overclass of heterosexual superpriests. The modern age demands it.

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Anyway, this was a weird week.

I worked an agonizing double shift — 8 hours at KRH with Clymer and then another 8 hours at the Stone Ring with Ms. Hodge. That meant getting only two hours of sleep beforehand…

…oh, i like Mr. Clymer, but working with him is excruciating. He doesn’t want anything to happen. He just wants to sit there and talk about mundane things that happened five years ago. I can never bring myself to reveal my laptop to him. I just get that vibe that it would be unwise. Plus, Mr. Clymer has gone all in on the Obama Conspiracy craze, saying things like “all those murders in Chicago, they’re done by black Democratic gang members. That’s Obama’s army.”

He even wanted me to look at some pages he’d printed off the internet, mostly pages of numbers proving that socialized medicine is 97% bad in every nation that has it, and that the President’s administration contains 56% fewer business owners than most administrations. Or, as Dahir so hilariously put it, “so he researches his ignorant shit?”

…then, after being gone for over 18 hours, i came home to find Mary sniffling in the living room because her and my brother had a huge fight. And when people fight, it makes Cooper nervous, and my bed was completely doused in a pool of dog urine.

Days like this, man. They try me.

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I think my brain has stopped processing time correctly. It never moves at the right speed. I sat there at work on a calm Tuesday morning, watching a wisp of cloud slowly crawl across the sky. It took eons for it to get from one side of the window to the other. And i thought back to how much time has gone by at this job; i’ve been working with Dahir and Muna for about eight months now. Before that, there was the boring two months with Walker. The two months with Whitaker. Three months with Nicholson. Two months of random people. Three months ofBertrand. Nine months with Milliken and Morris. The four months of the catastrophic flood. Four months with Bell and Morell. An epic fifteen months with Diggs and Isaiah. About three months with that Pearson lady…

…my god, that’s a lot of time. It’s all gone by too quickly.

Time.

I think i went through a time warp this week. No, really. After work on Sunday, i had to drive out to White’s Creek to pick up Dahir and give him a ride to his sister’s apartment because his car wouldn’t start. It was a good deed, but i was grumbling the whole way because i was tired and just wanted to go straight home for once after work. Amazingly, when it was over, i ended up back in Murfreesboro a mere 15 minutes later than i normally would have. And that should be impossible. I mean, it takes almost half an hour to get to White’s Creek, let alone back into the heart of Nashville, and then all the way back to the ‘Boro. And yet i got home at 9:15 instead of 9:00. And that doesn’t make sense.

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Anyway, it’s the weekend now. Apart from drawing, i’m going to attempt to make my own homemade chicken egg foo yung.

Wish me luck.

Edit: My homemade egg foo yung? Ugly as hell but tasty as fuck.

Why is our first electric bill in this new place $271? This can’t be normal.