that time i was into progressive metal
I came across some remixes of KISS songs and gave them a listen. The guy who did them absolutely admits that he purposely replaced a ton of the instruments with samples, and I know exactly why. That band never sounded good, and the only possible way to get a decent sound is to replace the original sounds. The remixed studio version of Rock and Roll All Nite (with solo!) is genuinely good, but the first thing I heard was that snare drum with gated reverb. Nope, wrong. The studio sound in 1975 for rock drums was super dry, and very much on purpose. Other 1975 rock songs like Fox on The Run by Sweet, Sweet Emotion by Aerosmith, Feel Like Makin' Love by Bad Company, Tush by ZZ Top and so on all had dry drums. The reverb wasn't just light, but rather simply engineered right out. Reverb in all forms was very not-cool at that time and wouldn't make a return until the reverb-everything sound of Van Halen in 1978.
So what the hell does this have to do with progressive metal? That snare with gated reverb fired off something in my brain that made me remember Crimson Glory from the late 1980s. And there's a story behind this one.
I found out about Crimson Glory when I was barely a teenager. How? No idea, but I can hazard a guess. Maybe I saw them in a magazine and then went to buy their album on tape (I didn't do vinyl records). Or, I went to look around for some new music at the record or department store, and just bought the tape in the hope it would be good. Getting music like that was not something I did often, but if I had a few bucks on me and was in the store, I wanted to get something so I didn't leave empty-handed.
The album I bought was Transcendence.
While I wasn't in love with the music when I first heard it, I liked it enough to play it quite a bit. It was good.
A friend of mine at the time found out I had that tape, and he wanted it really bad. My tape, specifically. This confused me since he could have easily went and bought a copy himself. But for whatever reason, he didn't. I think I know why, and I'll talk about that in a moment.
This friend asked me at first to give him the tape "if I didn't want it". No, not doing that. Later on, he offered to buy it off me. Um, no dude, not doing that. Then a little while later, he asked to buy it again. Nope. He gave up after that...
...except he didn't. The fate of that tape is that it was stolen from me by that asshole.
A running joke some comedians used to make is that if you lost one of your worthless tapes or records or whatever, somebody must have stolen it. Well, in my case, yeah, that prick actually did steal my tape.
The memory I have of this is faded now, but it was one of two situations that happened. Situation 1, he borrowed the tape and never returned it no matter how many times I asked for it back. Situation 2, he came over to hang out at my house one day, got sticky fingers and just straight up nicked it. I'm thinking it was situation 2 because I had the thought even back then that if he got his hands on it, I'd never see it again. This was especially true given his interest in the tape, and being the only guy I knew who even knew Crimson Glory existed other than myself. So yeah, he stole it.
That theft was something I let go, because whatever, it's just a tape.
Crimson Glory's Transcendence ended up being a here-today-gone-tomorrow thing. I just happened to be at the store when the tape was in stock. However, I don't think it sold well enough for the store to restock it or whatever, so it most likely vanished from the shelves pretty fast. And that's probably why that guy stole the tape from me. He probably tried to buy that tape, couldn't find it anywhere, I was the only guy who had it, he wanted it, he nicked it.
Is owning an original copy of Transcendence from the late '80s a prize now? No. The tape, CD or vinyl record can be acquired easily. If I really wanted that tape back, I could just buy another for about 20 bucks shipped.
So okay, nearly 40 frickin' years have passed since I last heard those songs. I go to listen to them again, online of course, and whammo, instantly familiar. Like, scary familiar. The first track Lady of Winter comes on, and for a brief moment I was in the late '80s again, being a kid sitting in my room and listening to that tape. Kinda intense.
That feeling really speaks to how much of a signature sound that album has. Now while true you can absolutely hear some fake drums, pretty much the exact same thing happened with Dream Theater. When you hear that totally fake, totally electronic snare drum on Pull Me Under, you cannot un-hear it once you know it's there. With Crimson Glory, the fake drums are heard most with the toms. I don't know why I can detect a fake snare or tom considering I don't even play drums, but my ear can pick it up very easily.
At the same time however, that half-real/half-fake drum sound was the only way to get the percussion to sound correct for late-1980s progressive metal. So while I wince a little when I hear the fake stuff, I get over that since that is part of the progressive metal sound of the era.
Progressive metal was something I liked, and then just stopped listening to it. I didn't stop liking it, but it had just run its course with me.
Am I back to liking it now? Not really, but I am amazed at how unbelievably quick I remembered Crimson Glory's music nearly four decades later, and all because of a snare drum sound from a remixed 1975 KISS song.
it's that summer gps navigation time again
If there's one thing I know to be true, it's that putting capacitive screens in cars was a really bad idea, and it's for one main reason. None of them handle heat well, and none ever will.
Every time I see one of those screens, I see something that will fail and be ridiculously expensive to replace. And that's assuming if it can even be replaced at all. Screen size doesn't matter. It could be a little panel screen, a large infotainment screen, whatever. Every screen is a future point of failure.
It's not if that screen will fail but when, and what will kill it will be heat. After a few summers in Arizona, Nevada, California, Texas, Florida, or anywhere else it gets nasty-hot in the summer, oh yes, there will be screen failures aplenty.
The same thing is true for phones if one is used in a car for navigation. On a hot summer day even with A/C running at full blast, if that phone is getting hit by the sun, it will heat up and shut down in about, oh, 15 minutes or fewer.
I've got a bunch of Garmin navigators, and it's my tradition now that every time summer comes around, I switch over to a very specific model, the Drive 52. Why that one? It's the last matte screen model they ever made. It is a touchscreen, but not capacitive, so it emits less heat and can also handle summer heat a whole lot better.
The 52 obviously isn't as advanced as the DriveSmart 66, but it is daylight readable and does its job. Yes, it does require the additional purchase of a 32GB microSD memory card to fit all the modern USA/Canada/Mexico map data, but that's just a one-time thing.
Where I appreciate the 52 most during summer is in two specific instances. Parking in a lot with no shade, and when sitting in traffic.
In a lot, such as a grocery store parking lot, if there is no shade to be found, after I park I can easily take the screen off the mount and put it in on the passenger side floor until I get back. If it's a stupidly hot day where I have to put up my sunshade, same thing. The screen has to come off the glass to put up the shade anyway.
While true I could do the same with a capacitive screen model, I then have to deal with waiting. As in waiting for the interior of the car to cool down before I can put the screen back on its mount. With a matte screen, I don't have to wait. Even if the interior of the car is hot and the dashboard is radiating heat, I can just click back the 52 on the mount, power it up, and off I go.
There have been times in the past when using a capacitive screen model where I've been sitting in slow or stopped traffic, it's summer, really hot, I touch the screen to adjust volume or whatever, and uh-oh, it's hot. This happens even when the A/C is running. Sure, the car interior temperature is fine, but the screen is on the glass and getting beaten by the sun. Now I'm nervous. With the matte screen, yes, it's warm in those instances when I touch it, but not hot to the point of getting nervous.
I lose features (like voice control) by switching over to the 52, but it's one of those things where the navigation matters more than anything else. I just need the thing to work. The 52 may be an older model, but for summer driving, it works.
i let things go since they will be destroyed anyway
When I was a kid, I had a friend who was really into a certain magazine and had three-foot-high stacks of them in his room, situated just to the side of the door and against the wall. Something like two or three of those stacks. And no, that's not an exaggeration. The only reason the stacks weren't higher is because they would start falling over. He was a bit of a hoarder, even as a kid.
I saw that, thumbed through a few of the magazines (it was Mad, by the way), thought they were neat, and started buying copies of my own since they were cheap. After a few months of doing that, I asked dad if he ever bought any Mad magazines when he was younger. He said he did, so I then asked if he ever kept any of them. He said he didn't. I replied to that with something along the lines of, "Aww! They'd be worth a lot of money today!" He just shrugged it off. And he was correct not to keep them, because vintage copies of Mad never truly became anything valuable.
Only one store local to me at the time sold Mad, a card and gift shop. I look online to see if that store is still around. Nope. That didn't surprise me.
But then I did a deeper dive, and found out two things.
First, that store was originally registered in 1967. I thought wow, neat.
Second, that business was dissolved...
...in 1988.
Oh.
Yeah, I didn't even know that until before I wrote this. That one hit me, because it means the store was gone even before I got my first driver's license.
The building still stands, so the place where the card shop used to be wasn't technically destroyed.
But another place I recently found out the fate of is a different story.
As a kid, a special occasion was when the family used to go to a Chinese restaurant that originally opened in 1974. Every time the family went either once or twice a year, we'd always order the exact same thing, the Pu Pu Platter. It was always good.
This Chinese joint legitimately looked like a restaurant you'd find in a theme park, even though it was located in very plain part of town. The most exciting thing near it was a convenience store across the street. That restaurant installed all their pseudo-upscale designs back in the mid-'70s and never changed, which was part of its charm. Inside, the place was divided into themed rooms, and the one the family always picked was the Fountain Room, because it had an actual operating fountain in the middle of it. That was neat.
Other than the restaurant changing its sign once since the old one was so beat up that it needed to be replaced, this Chinese place looked exactly the same for almost 50 years.
Yeah, almost 50 years.
In 2022, that restaurant burned to the ground. Literally.
Arson was how the place got destroyed. Arson by whom? Just some guy that liked to set fire to restaurants in the local area for whatever reason. The guy was found, arrested, and actually admitted that yeah, it was him. And the guy was married with a four-year-old kid. I've no idea why he liked to torch restaurants. Maybe he hated his wife. Maybe his kid ruined his prized Funko Pop collection and the guy took out his frustration by setting fire to buildings. Who knows.
The place where that Chinese restaurant stood was cleaned up, and now it's just an empty parking lot that will most likely stay that way.
Not only can I never go to that restaurant ever again, no building exists where it used to be.
Oh.
That one also hit me, and definitely more so than the card shop closing did. A card shop is a whatever thing, but family memories were made at that tacky Chinese restaurant. It would be one thing if the restaurant owner closed shop and some other business took the building, but that's not what happened. The building burned down. Ugh..
Learning to let go is important
The older I get, the more I understand that nothing is forever.
There are very few things that I know will stick around.
Where places are concerned, state parks pretty much stay the same since they're not places of commerce. Maybe a gate will be fixed/updated. Maybe some trees will be planted along with other beautification. Maybe a small shed or other small building will be constructed or removed. But as far as the park itself is concerned, that stays the same. As for any residential or commercial building, yeah there's no guarantee it will even be there next week.
For possessions, steel non-mechanical things stand the test of time. This could be any number of things like flatware, jewelry, all-steel tools, and so on. Anything plastic on the other hand is doomed from the start. That plastic, at some point, will degrade and break.
Wooden things can last, depending on type of wood and how it was constructed. For example, if cabinets were made from marine grade plywood (the best and heaviest kind), I am fairly certain they would last at least 50 years, with the only thing possibly breaking on them being the hinges and not the wood itself. Then again, industrial grade hinges would make future hinge problems a nonissue right quick.
The possessions I have that I hang on to are small in number, but are manageable. This is not to say I've not lost things, because I have. For what I do have, if there is any way I can get a duplicate, I get it if it's not crazy-expensive. This is why I bought a second 1989 Squier II Stratocaster guitar. I still have my first one, which is my first guitar, and it's the second one that gets played sometimes whenever I want an old-Strat fix. Also in my possession is something I was miraculously able to find a duplicate of on eBay, the exact same keychain I've had since my teens. I still have my original, but the dupe is what I use now just because I like it.
I have a few other things that are totally in the "only valuable to me" category, but again, small and manageable.
There is one thing I do concerning locations that allows me to save them in my own way. I get the GPS coordinates and keep them in a list. This is something I've been doing for years when I started realizing certain destinations can change drastically to the point of being unrecognizable, such as the Chinese place being burned to the ground.
Any time I'm driving and I come to a place where I think that I may visit it again, that gets saved in the Garmin right then and there. Later on, I copy the coordinates from the Garmin and put it into my list.
In my list are locations that aren't necessarily important to anyone else, but interesting to me. For example, I have the location of a former CompUSA saved that's now an EV dealership. I have the location of a former Sam Ash store that's now a Spirit Halloween. I also have the locations saved of places where I used to live, and for houses of where relatives used to live that have been gone for years.
There is one location I've been desperately trying to find for probably about 15 years now. The memory I have of it is very hazy. It was either a class trip or possibly a "kid's adventure" style thing my parents signed me up for before high school. About once a year I spend something like four to six hours going through Google Maps trying to find that location, and have never been able to find it. The only lead I have is from the hazy memory I have of the place. It was some kind of high point with a concrete or marble (or both) structure at the top, very tourist-friendly, with woods around it, with a very clear view of fields far below in the distance. If you think you know where this is, trust me, you don't. I have looked at photos of every mountaintop area in the region where I think it might be (somewhere in New England or possibly New York). I have looked at all the ski mountaintop areas too. I have looked at mountain areas that are now closed. I also expanded outside of mountaintop areas to anywhere with a high point. I even used AI to help try to locate the place. Every time, I end up empty-handed. But I've not given up hope. One day I will find it, AND IF I DO, oh yes, those coordinates will be saved, and you bet your ass I'm going to visit that place again.
I had a similar situation happen in Florida where I went to a very specific spot. At the time I actually did have GPS, and thought, "Yeah, I'd better save this...? Nah, I'll remember it."
I didn't remember it.
A few years later, I was scanning around with Google Maps, and whammo, FOUND IT. Oh, that made me a happy guy. Coordinates were saved, and I went there again. It was still awesome. That was the trigger moment that made me start saving coordinates in a list, and have been doing it ever since.
Now if I can just find that one frickin' spot in the northeast... ugh. Someday. I'm not letting go of that. I've let go of plenty of other things, but not that. The hunt is still on.
dopey gen y women regretting tattoos
Before I can talk about Gen Y girls who now realize getting tattoos was a seriously stupid mistake, I have to talk about the Gen X tattoo experience first.
I have no tattoos at all, but I knew a lot of people who did. And I know 100% of them all regret it.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was listening to metal music, playing pretty much nothing but metal on guitar, and hung around with people who were also into metal. And you absolutely can't be around people like that without seeing tattoos everywhere.
To some degree, I was the "weirdo" for not having any tattoos. And oh yeah, there were friends I had at the time who tried to make me go get one several times. Pretty much everyone I knew back then knew a guy who could ink me up. Whether it was just some dude who would do the inking in his house for cheap, or going to a parlor where you'd pay more, there was plenty of choice to be had. When I think about it, the choice available was quite impressive considering I grew up in Small Town Nowheresville USA.
When tattoos became super trendy in the mid-to-late-2000s due to all the reality TV shows about it, all the Gen X folk who had tattoos were pleased as punch about that since tats were now "cool".
Yeah, well, that didn't last.
Tattoos today will never be as "cool" as they were, as that time is long gone. Now you've got a bunch of tattooed Gen X who got old and fat. All that ink has now faded, all the weight put on stretched everything out, all the sharp lines of the original artwork fuzzed. It all looks like shit.
Gen X people who got tats back in the day all have regret for that decision. Every one of them.
As for the Gen Y girls, who at the present time are age 30-45, you would think they would have learned a valuable lesson (as in DON'T DO IT) from seeing what happened to tattooed Gen X girls. Nope. A bunch of them said screw it, and got inked up in their late teens and early 20s.
The inked up Gen Y girls in their early 30s now are the funniest of the lot. They say they feel regret for the ink they got in their younger years, but truly have no idea what's coming.
I would argue that women under 35 can still get away with tattoos because they have youth on their side, especially if they're fit. But once middle age truly kicks in, that is when the regret truly hits.
Inked up Gen X girls learned the very hard way that you cannot erase your age no matter how hard you try. Even if you lose the weight, get fit, and throw a bunch of money at cosmetic surgeries and whatever, you are never getting that early-20s girl back. Skin will stretch, wrinkle, and change color. Age spots will happen, possibly along with blotches here and there. Aging happens, and that's fine, except these girls all have ink loudly telling everybody who they were that doesn't even represent who they are now.
Back in my early and mid 20s when I saw all my metalhead friends at the time getting inked up, in my mind was the thought of, "that's a really bad idea". I wasn't thinking of what that ink would look like in the future. I wasn't thinking of how having ink would damage professional endeavors. I wasn't even thinking about the judgment of others when they would see the ink.
What I was thinking about was the permanence of that ink on my skin, and that's why I never pulled the trigger on getting a tattoo. Even in my young-and-dumb 20s, I recognized there was no way I could just take a shower and wash away that ink. The thought of not having an "undo" for that legitimately scared me.
There was also the whole Prerequisite Rules For Being A Metalhead thing that really rubbed me the wrong way, i.e. you must dress in all black all the time, must only listen to metal music and nothing else, must this, must that, must whatever, must blah blah blah. All in the name of being rebellious, except there's nothing rebellious about it. It's conformist. And part of that conformity to be "cool" with the metal crowd meant you must have tattoos. Yes, plural. Several of them. Ink up your whole body. Hop to it.
My thought on that was, "Yeah, I don't think so", which ended up being actual real rebellion compared to all those metalheads who were just a bunch of lemmings following each other.
For the Gen X girls who were all metal/punk/whatever years ago with tattoos everywhere, they all ended up in one of three states. Either old/fat/dumpy/bitter, old/thin/sickly/bitter, or old/thin/sickly/loopy.
The last one is, of course, the most interesting of the three. These broads are genuinely very nice people, and any sense of that pseudo-rebellious attitude is thankfully long gone, but they are absolutely hopped up on prescription brain pills 24/7. The brain pills are part of whatever else is in the cocktail of drugs they take for their ailments on the daily.
Broads like this are basically permanently dazed, hence the pleasant attitude. They can function and get by, but can't really do anything too complicated. As for all the tattoos they have, they stopped caring about those a long time ago. Too expensive to have removed, and too expensive to have them all redone, so they gave up on that. Their existence now is cats (they all have cats), astrology (they all own tarot decks), and gardening.
Inked Gen Y girls will all have the same fate, as their future has already been decided. They'll just be a bunch of haggard looking cat ladies who never go out on days when Mercury or Neptune is doing weird shit or whatever, and grow tomatoes. And maybe make their own soaps.
It's not all doom and gloom, however. Many of the inked Gen X girls got themselves out of their personal hell and got centered once again by losing weight, getting crafty and getting outside. They know how to do things like fix a washing machine, mend and paint a fence, re-tile a bathroom and so on, among other things. A fair amount of them also went all-in with the "modern witch" look, which to be honest is kinda cute. Instead of that stupid rebellious look nonsense, they dress in flowy garb that's more classy. Nothing wrong with that. Some also got healthy enough to get off the brain pills, which is a significant improvement moving forward.
In their own way, some inked up Gen X girls found their way to be proper women as best they could and make it work. Gen Y girls will have to do the same when their time comes.
Tattoos today? Fake it, and be unapologetic about it.
I honestly don't know why anybody would bother with permanent tattoos in the first place when temporary tattoos (and sleeves) exist. Heck, you can even get a little tattoo printer now to just make up whatever.
Yes, all those tattoos are fake, but 100% of them have the "undo" built right in. Don't like the way one came out? WASH IT OFF, problem solved.
I've seriously thought about buying some temp tattoos and posting videos of myself with some applied just for the goof. Or better yet, purposely changing the tattoo to something different every so often in the same spot just to throw people off. I think that's funny.
$80 oil change
I found out very recently that the price of oil changes might go up, so even though my car didn't need one right now, I got an oil change anyway. Drove to my local garage, and was expecting the price to be $35 to $50. Nope. I was told $91, but was able to get the place to knock it down to $80 out the door.
The price I paid was just under the wire before it gets really bad.
How bad?
$120 bad, before tax. And that's for a cheap car like mine. For other cars, anywhere from $150 to $300, and that's not even for a luxury car. And no, I'm not kidding...
...so it's not that oil change prices might go up, they have gone up and will go up even higher.
Motor oil prices started getting jacked up in the beginning of May, but starting next month will be when $100+ will be the norm for an oil change.
Is it the Middle East oil supply disruption that caused this crap? From what I understand, yes. How long will this go on until oil supply is stabilized again? Could be a few months up to a year.
However, that doesn't mean garages will lower their prices even when the price of motor oil goes back down.
I was changing the oil in my car myself for a while, but then started having a local garage do it instead. When my next oil change is due, I may go back to doing it myself if garages don't lower their prices after motor oil prices go back down.
I'll be watching the prices, to be sure.
If the sting of paying 3 digits for an oil change is too much, learn how to change the oil in your car. I'd also strongly recommend buying a pack of oil filters. The combination of buying the motor oil locally and ordering your filters online is how you maximize savings.
I also have one other recommendation that works for most cars. Go 100% synthetic with your oil. Why? Lasts longer. Not just in your car, but an unopened container of it has a 5 to 7 year shelf life.