I love ya kid, but your drums suck.

Phil Collins. Don Henley. The guy from the Everyday Visuals. There are definitely drummers out there who can sing. And my uncle Johnny? Definitely not.

I remember these great stories of him opening for the Stones, of dragging his first kit home on the green line from Copley out to the end of the D line (that’s got to suck.) The Midnight Suns was his band….great name….I’m still hoping that some random Google search will bring up some clip of him in a bandana and crappy ripped jean jacket. But these stories wouldn’t be complete without a puff of smoke and this gargled hacking laugh in your face. Tremendous individual though. The man was Boston through-and-through. God forbid any other 2^nd tier blood reads this, but he was my favorite of that group. You always knew when Johnny was coming, because someone busted out the ashtray and the O’Doul’s. And if I got home late, I’d hear him plugging away at my snare, over and over again. Then he’d come downstairs with that kick-ass swagger of a man who had a bass drum instead of a heart, and it’d always be the same….”I love ya kid, but your drums suck.” Nothing like a consummate rocker to put me in my place.

He actually walked out of a Who concert back in ’00, shaking his head at the testosterone-crazed youth bouncing around to “My Generation,” shaking his head and muttering, “you kids just don’t get it.” And that damn drum stool! He had this crap woven-topped, weak-legged drum stool, this crappy little thing that obviously hadn’t gotten enough vitamins in its youth. Which was, coincidentally, sometime around the early 70’s, when my uncle first bought it. If you looked at the thing, it just fell over. Like those damn goats (seriously, check out YouTube for fainting goats or something like that…freakin’ hilarious.) So Johnny gives me this piece of crap one year for Christmas, and it’s all sentimental, all eye-water and lung-butter, which was cool. So then I give it back to him the next year, trying to be all sentimental back (or cheap, depending on how you looked at it.) He opens this, and totally deadpans “What the hell is this? What made you think I wanted this back?” This ritual went on for at least 3 more years. The poor guy even picked it during a Yankee swap. Oh well.

Funny thing is, I’d love to have that stool right now.

Johnny never actually claimed to sing, but his band was pretty tight, according to my mom, and my nana used to talk about how much bacon the Jewish guys in the band would plow through after practice at her house on Saturday mornings. I’m not making a direct connection between bacon and singing abilities, because if I were, than my history of bacon sandwiches at the Abbey would’ve made me Frank Sinatra. I guess what I’m trying to say is, his drumming was great. His sarcasm superb. His ability to make himself a better person was truly admirable. But if I had to tell him about his singing, it’s probably come out something like: “Johnny, I love ya, but your singing sucks.” And that’s the truth.

My uncle Johnny died this morning.

I miss you Johnny. Keep the beat, wherever you are.

November 15th - Atlantic musings

The first of what I will only assume will be many, many, many written texts. It had take six years to un-cramp my hand from all that furious note-taking in Roman History, and now I get to look forward to fingertip bruising from furious note-taking in this crazy new era of technology. At least I don’t have to worry about breaking my space bar from excitement, like some college room-mates I know.

So I get through baggage, my first lesson in the whole metric conversion….it goes well enough, the lady at the ticket counter didn’t even blink when I voiced my surprise at how little the dead babies in my suitcase actually weighed. Good bargain for the buyer, if you’re getting it by the pound. Then off through security, and Steve and I end up at the Sam Adams “Brew House,” which is really more of a “Brew Semi-Circle,” complete with head-inducing soundwaves for your Guiness, and Octoberfest on tap. So what if it’s not actually October? So what if your non-Sam Adams beers outnumber the Sam Adams beers by a 4 to 1 margin? So what if the guy’s wearing a Harpoon shirt while pouring you a Sam? I’ve got freakin’ soundwaves in my Guiness! You can actually taste the sound of the potato famine in every sip! And I don’t know about you, but I’m all about hearing my food from here on out. I don’t want to even see it, I want to feel like I’ve eaten purely from the sound of it. Does broccoli actually scream when it’s being ripped from its roots? God I hope so, because Andrew needs his audible greens.

But I digress. And why type when I could be scarfing down fresh-squeezed orange juice from the can? Why am I wondering how many f’s there are in scarfing when there’s regulation-sized Coke….uh, light? Am I seeing that right…To be had? Mmmmm….Parmalat…the wave of the future. Now all we need are shelf-stable, square cows, and we’re in business. Forget dead babies…shelf-stable cows are the perfect food. If they make them sound good, that is.

Apparently God was taking a smoking break when they created the monstrosity of a sandwich they just served me. And by served I mean boomeranged it from the safety of business class. Why is it that when you ask the stewardess/sky waitress/flight attendant/mile-high runway model/whatever’s P.C. these days for anything, they get this twinge of “does not compute” in their eyes. And I think they clone themselves in the overhead compartments. Apparently, as a row of four people in coach seem to add up to one whole person in business class, we get the equivalent of one-fourth of a sandwich each. That seems right. Once we’ve understood these crazy opposable thumbs and learn how to make fire, us coach serfs shall rise up, I tell ye. And then we’ll create a better sandwich. Yes, that sounds like a good order of progression. I won’t even go into what I think was in the sandwich, because the combination is probably a punishable offense somewhere. I’m just praying that this is the worst food I have the entire next year.