Entries from December 2002 ↓

With their bands, Joey Ramone and Joe Strummer represent the extents of the punk spectrum, both in time and in substance. The Ramones were one of the first of the punk bands, surfacing at CBGBs in the mid-70s, and playing their brilliantly brainless 3-chord paeans to sniffing glue, performed at blinding speed in the style of some alternate-reality girl group. Strummer’s band, the Clash, was more cerebral, more worldly, more political, and angrier, infusing their left-wing sentiments with reggae, rockabilly and latin rhythms, and ending the punk era with their break-up in 1982.

One of the biggest disappointments of my concert-going life was my inability to get tickets to see the Clash at their 17-date Bond’s Casino stand in New York City 1981. When the fire inspectors closed the show for overcrowding, the band decided to extend their stay long enough so that every ticket-holder would get a chance to see the show. I wasn’t one of them.

Ramone died last year of lymphoma, and Strummer died yesterday of an apparent heart attack. Unlike the Who and the Stones, both Ramone and Strummer died before their times, before they got old.

Nine inches of snow dropped on the Greater Baltimore area yesterday. Not a lot by Buffalo standards, but more than the combined total snowfall of all the storms we’ve had over the past two winters.

Shoveling the driveway would’ve been easy except that my next door neighbor parked her new SUV in the narrow street, forcing the snowplow to take a wide berth around our connected driveways. So, after shoveling my driveway, I had another 10 feet of heavy snowplow snow to remove. The neighbor, meanwhile, didn’t bother shoveling — she just drove right over the piled-up snow.

Driving into work today, I watched a Ford Taurus go off the road and into a guardrail when a Dodge Durango shed its rooftop snowcap directly onto the smaller car’s windshield. The SUV driver kept going, oblivious to everything but his leather seats and dashboard GPS. I would have liked to see if the driver was okay, but my little Hyundai was boxed in between a couple of minivans, an 18-wheeler and a yellow Nissan XTerra, also sporting a roof-full of snow.

It’s time for a backlash, please. This behavior of the gluttons who purchase these things is perfectly in keeping with our expectations of their selfishness. They don’t care about the environment, nor about the increasing dependence on foreign oil, nor about the danger to other drivers on the roads, nor the danger to themselves.

Ever been to a concert where you’ve paid for a decent seat, but the people in front of you insist on standing up? Eventually, you have to stand up, too, forcing the people behind you to stand, and so on, and so on. I’m afraid that’s going to happen on the roads, too, as smaller, more efficient cars are traded in, just so we can see what’s going on around us.

UPDATE (01/01/03): Should have seen her comment long before now, but Chloe has a GREAT list of reasons to hate SUVs on her blog.

November disappeared in a blur. Jenn and I spent Halloween night — her favorite holiday — stranded in a traffic lane on a dark road when her Saturn just up and died. We didn’t even have enough juice to power our hazard flashers, so each car going by made us cringe as we braced for impact. Turned out to be a bad battery, which Saturn — “A different kind of car company” — typically denied all responsibility for.

Jenn was out of town the next week, training for her new job, while I worked tons of overtime on an out-of-control project which kept me in the office til the wee hours several nights.

When she came back, we attended a family reunion of my mother’s distant relatives. I was supposed to invite the immediate fam back to my house to see our place, but — not having had a chance to make the place look like anything other than a pigsty bachelor pad — I disappointed them all by un-inviting them. My mother is still pissed at me about that.

The next week, amidst the despair engendered by the horrible election results, my neglected teeth decided to call for attention. The low-level throbbing pain grew into a major seismic event which sent me rushing to an unknown dentist who wrestled the tooth out of my head, his foot propped on my chest for leverage. The next couple of days went by in a codeine haze.

Jenn went away again for some more training and I realized what a pathetic loser I am without her as I moped around, unable to motivate myself to do anything other than crossword puzzles and mah jongg games.

When she came back, we noticed Claudio, Jenn’s favorite orange male tiger cat, was acting a little strange, hiding instead of being his usual social self. On Monday morning, I witnessed him making a spastic attempt at walking, limbs stiff and uncoordinated, until he fell over and was unable to stand for a couple of moments. I took him to the local vet, who determined that he had some calcification in his left kidney as well as an enormously elevated white-cell count and might benefit from having the kidney removed. Jenn took him for an ultrasound to determine if the other kidney was okay, but that doctor found that not only was the other kidney bad, too, but there was evidence of several massive lymphomas in his intestinal tract. We took Claudio home, held him, cuddled him, then brought him to the vet for euthanasia. He didn’t go gently, taking a double dose of sedative to put him under, before the final shot which stopped his heart. While Jenn cried uncontrollably, I buried him in the backyard near our our other dead cat, Cordelia.

Thanksgiving was a little hollow. My relatives — no cat owners among them — tried to sympathize, but you could tell many of them were thinking, “Get over it!” We drove up to New Jersey to my cousin’s house for dinner, since my parents were closing up their New York home for the trip to Florida to their winter home. It was a nice holiday meal — they made a Tofurkey for me and Jenn — but it was the first we’ve had in the house of one of my generation. A torch-passing kind of thing, with all its attendant melancholy.

So, I’m glad that month is over… Here’s hoping this one’s better.