Friday Random 11

It’s one more random than 10!

This month marks five years of the Random 11, a feature I started after I got an iPod for Christmas in 2006. I’ve written 168,000 words since then, with a few of those not even connected to dick jokes.

Yesterday was also the first day of the season that I needed my winter boots. I’m honestly starting to become very Republican on this global warming thing. Just round up all those swimming polar bears, open a few new zoos, and turn on the ice maker. Extinction solved and I can still wear shorts on New Year’s.

1) “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” The Rolling Stones. This would perfect for a Cialis commercial. Boomer couple goes to a Stones concert and is right in the front row. The voice-over guy talks about how you want to be ready when the mood strikes while Mick sings the song. Then after 45 seconds of medical disclaimers, the song climaxes, and before the husband can hustle his wife to the back seat of the Lexus, Mick reaches out, pulls the wife onstage Courtney Cox-style, and takes her backstage, throwing one last wink as the voice-over guy says, “Keep the rock rolling with Cialis.”

2) “Punk Rock Girls,” The Queers. The Lovely Becky and I have talked about Libby as a teenager and how we would react to Libs dyeing her hair. TLB came up with a great solution: Libby can dye her hair any color she wants, but she’ll get a surprise when her mom shows up with her hair the same color. However, piercings will be right out because I’m not becoming a pin cushion to make a point.

3) “My Delirium,” Ladyhawke. I have been tired all week because I am a dumb ass. Why am I a dumb ass? Because my fatigue stems from playing videogames late at night instead of sleeping like a responsible adult. Because I try to be a responsible adult and not play videogames around my toddler-age daughter, I wait until she’s asleep. Unfortunately, I have been playing The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, which is a crack rock shaped in the form of a 20-sided die. Oh, I’ll just play for an hour or two, I say to myself, with the delusion of an alcoholic hitting happy hour for the appetizers. Four hours later I’m woozy, incoherent, and not wearing pants. This is why I never played World of Warcraft, because I’d be like one of those Korean gamers who dies after forgetting to eat. (I made the mistake of starting Skyrim while Libby was awake, just to check it out. How bad could it be at the beginning, I thought. Of course, the game opens with a beheading and a dragon killing everything in sight. What’s got two thumbs and is father-of-the-year material? This guy.)

Bonus fun material: An absolutely killer bit about videogames from comic Dara O’Briain. He destroyed me with laughter when he started talking about Metal Gear Solid.

4) “Gideon (Live),” My Morning Jacket. Probably makes my All-Crescendo List.

5) “Nothing,” Stabbing Westward. I don’t know if Trent Reznor ever got royalties from these guys, but he should have. Also, the title of the album is Ungod, which is Latin for We are trying too hard to be edgy.

6) “Time for Me to Fly,” REO Speedwagon. My company used to have a yearly conference in Vail, Colorado. I got to attend the last year we held it, and while I certainly worked, the experience was bookended by two of the drunkest nights out with coworkers I have ever had. The first night there (the day before the event started), and after being warned that drinking in high altitudes can exacerbate the effects of alcohol if you’re not used to it, I had an evening where I started drinking 7-and7s, switched to Maker’s on the rocks because I wasn’t getting drunk fast enough, then switchied back to the 7-and-7s because the Maker’s was making me blind (along with the nicotine blitz I was getting from the smart decision to smoke). Thank God I didn’t need to start the next day until 11.

When the event ended, we went to a bar where this one guy was a musician in residence. He had a big fat book of covers you could request, and in my drunken happy state (it had been a great week and we were celebrating a successful event) I requested this song and sang along with it. I would have popped a lighter in the air if I had one at the time. I feel a bit of shame because this is a sappy, sappy, sappy song, even if in deep dark places I don’t talk about at cocktail parties, I really do love it.

7) “Snowblind,” Black Sabbath. I don’t think Ozzy’s talking about winter drifts in January. For all the perils of today’s society, I am glad cocaine was no longer chic by the time I reached an age where I might have been tempted to try it. Because there’s no way if I was 20 in 1977 that I wasn’t doing a couple of lines before heading to a Foghat concert. That’s why I stick to booze—I tend to get too sleepy by the time I would do any real damage. The last thing I need is to get hooked on something that would have me playing Skyrim for 56 straight hours.

8) “Ray,” Aimee Mann. Amazingly not on the YoutTube. Year ago TLB—a giant Aimee Mann fan—was discussing with me why she liked Aimee Mann so much, and she launched into this discussion of Mann’s rhyming couplets and how she is so creative in how she structures her rhymes and will often string together a several quick lines of rhymes. I said, “She sings real pretty.” Guess which one of us is the professor. This song is real pretty, too.

9) “Rock N Roll,” Led Zeppelin. The other day, my mind wandered into this weird daydream where Alex Lifeson of Rush personally thanked me for sending him a copy of my award-winning novel (as well as commenting how funny I was on The Colbert Report), and then asked me, being a giant Rush fan, what kind of setlist they should play on their next tour (I wish to Cookie Jesus I was making this up). In mid-daydream, I actually stopped to give this some thought before replying to imaginary Lifeson that they would absolutely slay everyone in attendance if they opened with a cover of this. Which, all psychiatric concerns from how I reached this conclusion aside, would indeed melt the faces of every Rush fan in attendance. Or at least the ones who were not seated in the imaginary front row like I was. And no, Geddy did not pull me onto the stage Courtney-Cox style.

10) “Late Night Conversation,” Josh Rouse (decent cover version). One of the downsides of having a large collection of music on my computer (far too much for my 80 gig iPod to hold anymore) is that I don’t always get to listen to a lot of it. Which is a big reason why I love doing this post each week—sometimes something comes up and I go, “Oh, that’s good, I should get it,” before remembering that I have it. Incidentally, after Skyrim, late-night conversations with TLB are the next largest source of sleep deprivation. It’s literally like the lights go off and we start shooting the breeze (and no, that’s not a euphemism). So my two biggest sources of not getting enough sleep are running around an imaginary fantasy world and talking to my wife while in bed. It’s a damn good thing I’m married because I would have no fucking clue how to woo a woman these days.

11) “Wonderwall,” Oasis. I know Von hates this, as does TLB, but I love it. It has that universality that I think great singles have, where it can appeal to a lot of people who normally wouldn’t agree on anything. For instance, let’s say that I was talking with Beyonce, who also was complimenting me on my appearance on The Colbert Report. It wouldn’t surprise me if, when this song started playing, we both said, “I love this song.” And then we’d laugh and say, “Jinx, by me a Coke,” and then Jay-Z would have his guy Pain-Luv dangle me from the penthouse balcony. That’s good songwriting.

Bonus: “The Unsinkable Fats Domino,” Guided By Voices. A new classic sounding GbV song from the classic GbV lineup. Worth watching this performance from Letterman to see, as one YouTube commenter put it, “the sinkable Greg Demos.”

Have a great weekend.