Animal Stencils

I feel like a foreigner. Since the 3^rd Infantry Division arrived at FOB Speicher, everyone has thick southern accents. I’m the only person at the bus stop that doesn’t sound like I’m from Georgia. I’m also the only person who doesn’t end my sentences by spitting tobacco.

~Chris

It’s easy to lose track of what day it is while I’m in Iraq. Most days are not disguisable. There is one day I look forward to, one day that is a beacon hope. The day before, when we’re leaving the office, Eric always asks, “Do you know what tomorrow is?” Of course I do, it’s Taco Friday!

I guess we could have picked another day to get excited about. It’s not like we have weekends off, but I think Friday has other connotations we relate too. We can think of it as the end of the week even if we do come in on Saturdays. Plus it sounds a lot better than Meat Loaf Monday.

I’ll be finished with my deployment in May 2010. Unless something crazy happens to me, I will have eaten at least 150 tacos before I’m back in the states. Some of you may think it’s sad that I count the passing of time in tacos and you would right.

~Chris

My neighbors built this structure for their cats. The inside is filled with walkways and scratching posts. It is connected to the house so the cats can move between the two buildings freely. I’ve tried to count how many there are but it is impossible to say. There must be at least eight. Probably more.

~Andrea

I’ve seen the Raveonettes a few times. All of them were at the Magic Stick in Detroit. I don’t think any show had more than 50 people there. They were on Sony at the time and it baffled me that a major label band could have a small turnout.

I was trying to find a review of a Roland Juno Di that didn’t read like a catalog description when I saw an article on the new Raveonettes album In and Out of Control. The first sentence of the article said, “What if someone convinced you to shed everything about yourself that characterized you? Would you still be yourself?” I nearly puked when I read that so I had to check out the album.

I went to iTunes to hear a sample. After I cleaned the puke off my headphones to listen to a song, I was pleased. I wouldn’t say it’s an extreme departure. They still sound like the Jesus and Mary Chain but more like Darklands than Psychocandy. If I were the critic I would have written they recorded a pretty album that isn’t as distortion saturated as the past 8 years. I’m downloading the album right now.

~Chris

I was burned out on post-punk a month ago. I was reading a horrible book called Rip It Up and Start Again about the history of the genre, and by the time I was finished I didn’t want to listen to anything post or punk.  It was written like the worse Wikipedia entries. You know, the ones that people start so people who know something about the subject will correct it. Or worse like the entries you question if the band wrote it themselves. Yuck!

I decided to take a break and the next time my emusic subscription renewed I would download albums the mainstream rock credits loved. I read the Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums list before I downloaded albums by Al Green, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Meat Loaf, Carole King, Janis Joplin, and a couple of others. Most of them were great but a few of them were stinkers.

I’m listening to Janis Joplin right now, so I’ve been youtubing her interviews. I like the ones on the Dick Cavett show. It’s fun to watch these because you can tell they like each other. I don’t mean like like but I think they’re amused by each other. It makes me happy to see when one makes the other smile.

~Chris

Communting by train is new to me still, and will probably never become boring. There is endless opportunity to observe all sorts of human behaviors, the rare and the mundane.

The other day a man in a tattered purple track suit boarded, pulling a suitcase on wheels with a boombox haphazardly duck taped to it. He (consideratly) asked what we wanted to listen to. When no one responded, he announced, “It doesn’t matter, I’m going to listen to whatever the hell I want” and hit play, subjecting the other passengers and I to 40 minutues or so of smooth jazz elevator music.

Everyone sat in tense silence while he proceeded to make belligerant and racially insensitive comments about the appearance of various passengers, calling a man with dreadlocks “rasta” and a man who was probably Middle Eastern “amigo”. And so on. I pretended to read the newspaper and passed nervous glances back and forth with the woman next to me while waiting for my stop.

~Andrea

I’m glad I didn’t listen to Bob Dylan when I was kid. I think I would have been spoiled and turned off to a lot great music. It seems like kids who listened to Bob Dylan were above listening anything that came after Bob Dylan. I’m basing that on my first girlfriend who ridiculed people who liked the Ramones (even though she had what she called a punk phase). I know this is a generalization.

~Chris