Month: October 2002

Two comments I’ve gotten on the CD Mix of the Month October mix in the last 24 hours:
Calexico and Spoon in one CD? I think I love you.
I was a crabwalk.com virgin until last night…and unlike the time I really lost my virginity, this was FREAKING AWESOME…I wanted to stand up on my couch and raise my hands in victory.
I should have started the club a loooong time ago. Women haven’t liked me this much since I was a wee lad. (I was cute until about 18 months.)
In music news: the new Pavement reissue is absolutely aces, the new Richard Buckner sounds very good so far, the new Hot Hot Heat sounds entertaining if an inch deep, and I no longer have to feel so bad about not owning a single Belle and Sebastian album.
One final observation from tonight’s CD purchasing run: I love homegrown indie record stores as much as the next wannabe, but Jesus Christ, could someone tell the staff to bathe? It being Halloween, tonight’s Sweaty Counter Hipster was dressed in a big, run-down bear costume. I couldn’t tell if the odor was coming from his corpus or the Eisenhower-era “fur” draping his estimable flanks. It almost made me want to trade in my worn indie cred for some Rod Stewart, a little Bartles & Jaymes, and ventilation.

This is so unspeakably sad. I’m sure there’s a run at all America’s Halloween costume stores for Adidas track suits and Kangols.

Before I forget, here’s my story from today’s paper.

Leslie Jordan may be tiny and fey, but he is not Tina Fey.

Over the weekend, I tried to mail a bunch of CDMOM discs. I went to the post office and stood in line for about 25 minutes. When I got to the front of the line, with three Target bags filled with about 80 mailers, the postman said to me:
“Sorry, but we won’t be able to take those.”
Excuse me? All he had to do is put the metered postage stickers on them.
“Sorry, but that would take too long.”
Take too long? I couldn’t stop thinking: Is this not the post office? The place one goes to mail things? I’ve got some experience in mailing lots of little packages — it might have taken seven or eight minutes.
Instead, he sold me about 350 stamps, which I had to go back home to apply one by one.
This is both an ill-considered plea for sympathy and an alert that all of this month’s mixes are finally out the door. Which means I can finally unveil the October mix’s contents.

Over the weekend, a toothpaste purchase pushed my bathroom cabinet into chaos. A cleansing was in order, and I pulled everything out to separate the wheat from the proverbial chaff.
It was alarming how much of the chaff dated back to high school or earlier. There were lots of little shampoos I swear came from debate tournament hotel rooms. Old empty prescription bottles from 1992. I never knew I had so much floss.
And waaaay in the back were three bottles of high school memories: Brut, Old Spice, and Aqua Velva. (Surprisingly, I didn’t get much action in high school.)
Right before I was going to throw the three bottles out, I had this vision of their alcohol-laden contents exploding in some trash bin, so I decided to empty them out before tossing them. I poured all three into my sink Sunday morning.
And now my sink smells like an overanxious freshman. Try as I might, the smell won’t go away.
(If this was a This American Life piece, this is the part where I’d draw a larger meaning about how our youth defines us in ways we only discover later. But this isn’t a This American Life piece, so I’ll just end the post.)

OK already!

Why isn’t the world going wild over the new Tahiti 80 album? Geezumpete, it’s an instant classic. Great track after great track. Throw it in the player and it’s a summer day, driving with the top down. We’re talking Official Crabwalk.com Seal of Approval material here.

Here’s my mediocre story from today’s paper.

In today’s episode of People Who Should Be Muzzled: Any adult who pronounces the word library “lie-berry.”
In particular, this applies to people who work in a library, and thus repeat the word dozens of times per day.
Honorable mention goes to people who pronounce our nation’s capital as “Warshington.”