And she's known in the darkest clubs for pushing ahead of the dames

Apropos of my most recent post, this is the only shirt I'm gonna wear from now on, and I mean every single day and night, forever and ever and ever because I love it SO HARD:

Hat tip to Adrien at the forever-wonderful Looks Good From the Back for finding it -- they do good work over there, and not just on the days they post pics of Idris Elba. Although that is really nice, when they do that; it's a public service provided at no cost to the viewer, like that bat-signal thing the networks run at noon on Tuesdays to make sure you know when we are or are not in a nuclear war.

When we meet again, it won't be me.

I went super-deep down a rabbit hole the other day, putting together a perfect Halloween costume -- I wasn't really planning on dressing up because although it is fun and cool to dress up, the last few Halloweens have been on weekdays and I have young kids and all we do is make a circuit of the cousins' apartment complex, which hardly feels like worth going to any trouble for, but this year we're staying local and going to do our rounds in a neighborhood that I am assured has an AWESOME Halloween scene, so when Kid Gleemonex asked what me and Daddy are going to dress up as, I suffered a spasm of long-buried need to Do Halloween. SO.

Anyway. I wanted to be this, and it is this that I spent the day working on (trolling every website from Zappos to Lands' End, with large amounts of time on eBay, etsy, and LL Bean):

And but then I was double-checking the shoes, and watched the whole scene:

And realized that age wise, I'm much more properly suited to this (although not, in both cases, nearly so striking-looking):

And now I'm wondering if it would in fact verge on the grotesque to try to do my original idea, and anyway if Mr. Gleemonex won't do this (which he hasn't said yes or no yet):

Then what exactly is my deal? New idea ... new idea. Hm.

The jerk store called. They're running out of you!

37/40

I might actually die of wanting one of these "Can't Stand Ya" dresses. For real and for serious.

Fun fact: The person who makes them is Erin Pearce, aka the voice of Toodee on Yo Gabba Gabba.

Funner fact: She's 24. So ... like, I guess Old Lady Gleemonex and a youngster of the Millennial stripe could actually get along. All we gotta do is get going on Seinfeld quotes and we're likethis!

The five spots of paint - the man, the woman, the children, the ball - remained. The rest was a thin charcoaled layer.

So that Russian meteor thing -- holy crap that was awesome. Friday morning's family snuggle (aka the time right at the asscrack of dawn when our daughter bursts through the door of our room, assaults one of us -- the irregular variation of her choice is what keeps it lively! -- with a book to the face, and piles in on us) was given over to watching videos of the event on my iPhone. Fucking gnarly.

And of course part of my interest in it was that it hucked me back in the ol' wayback machine to my yute, when I was convinced -- I mean utterly, thoroughly convinced, more convinced than I was of the divinity of Jesus and THAT is saying something -- that the world was going to end any day now in nuclear war. Global thermonuclear war.

Fucking Reagan*. Fucking Weekly Reader. Fucking The Day After.

I was trying to explain this absolute dread fascination with Russia generally and nuclear holocaust in particular to my sister-in-law recently. She's almost 9 years younger than me, which is enough years that she didn't grow up in that insane soup of dread & doom centered on the Russians and "emptying the holes" and "a millisecond of brilliant light and we're vaporized" and unironic cries of "Wolverines!" My husband (39) and my brother (42) both chimed in, backing me up, and she began to understand it in sort of an intellectual way, but I think you had to be there to really get what it was like to know in your heart that it was gonna happen tonight -- or maybe tomorrow during the times-tables test in math, or Thursday just as you get out of ballet class -- and no duck-and-cover drill could save you.

I don't know whether this was the cause of, or merely a large component of, my dread fascination with all sudden disaster -- Francine covered it way better than I can right now -- but I've always been "into"** everything from Chicxulub to Tunguska to the goddamned Titanic (I transcribed about 3/4 of Walter Lord's A Night To Remember in lavender Le Pen in a spiral notebook I stole from my sister that had My Little Pony on the front, and that's the stone truth), so this (particularly since it was over Russia) hit me right in the brain-nads.

PS: People with kids may not want to read this story, which has haunted me since I read it in the New Yorker in 2004. Or maybe you do, if your style is to look your worst fears directly in the face.

PPS: also: lol.

-------------------------------------
*Seriously: Fuck that fucking guy. 

**I say "into," but it's not in a good way -- just an unstoppable thirst to know about the worst, the baddest, the horror and the chaos and the ashes of what's left. Maybe this is how irreligious me copes with the unknowable mysteries of this dangerous fucking universe -- or maybe I should get me a hobby that doesn't involve catastrophe? Probably that second thing. 

Four Happinesses

Possible Reasons, At Any Given Time, That I'm Sitting Over Here Cackling to Myself Like the Office Version of a Crazy Street Person Today

--"Pace yourself, Judy."
Hader is now in that awesome phase on SNL, where he's doing stuff that makes him laugh instead of pitching in wherever needed, and he usually fucking kills me -- but on the John Hamm ep, he did another Vincent Price Special, and y'all, Judy Garland was on it, shitfaced on pills & booze, and he tolerates it for awhile, then goes, as she's swallowing another handful of uppers/downers/screamers/laughers, "Pace yourself, Judy. It's only 7:30." And I DIED. And laughed my ass off. And died again. Laugh/die/revive/repeat. Since TWO WEEKS AGO I've been laughing about this line, y'all -- I typed it into Word, printed it out, and put it on my cube wall at work! "Pace yourself, Judy," I'll say to myself, then laugh out loud. "Pace yourself, Judy," I scribble in a notebook in a boring meeting, then try to cover the snarfling with a cough. "Pace yourself, Judy," I decide will be the name of my production company, then laugh/die/revive/repeat. And it keeps gettin funnier every time I think of it!

--Jesus Gets Around.
He's doin' 50 in a 65! This is the kind of thing that would probably annoy the shit out of my mom, but I can't get enough of it.

--This, which my friend posted on another friend's Facebook wall, in commiseration over a pear-related purse mishap: "I killed [my wife]'s Blackberry by putting in the same pocket as a pear a couple months ago. It squished around so much it got into the keyboard."

--The maniac German of a Spinning instructor who came up to me specially after class on Monday to tell me that "Dat vass excellent vork on de flats today. Very goot!"[very serious face, nod of Schrute-like approbation + clench of fist denoting contained but sincere enthusiasm]. Me, FTW!

We're ten hours from the fucking fun park and you want to bail out?

A Random Selection of Things I Remember About Going to Six Flags Over Texas as a Yute

--It would be hot as fuck, no matter what -- you were going to sweat, and you'd try to get cooled off by going in that creepy Spelunker's Cave thing or the Log Flume ride; the former would work for ten minutes, but then by contrast from the air-conditioned dark (with elves) you'd be extra super hot when you got back out into the blasting furnace of the Texass summer, while the latter only netted you a wet T-shirt & shorts and a smell of green water swamp-ass funk for the rest of the day.

--Once I went with CN's family, and they totally did it wrong; instead of the kids running off and meeting back up at regular intervals, we all had to stick together the whole day. Instead of paying too much for lunch at, say, the "Mexico" area, we had to go out to BFE* to some shadeless miserable picnic table off the grounds and eat lousy French's-mustard bologna sandwiches and stuff they brought in a cooler. And we did not get to stay till the place closed. LAAAME.

--From the ages of about eleven to ... probably fifteen, one of my primary must-do's on the list was to get my picture taken in the Olde Tymie Photoe Boothe thing, where you'd pull on a Southern Belle costume that tied in the back and get yer pitcher took, done up all olde-tymie. I had this thing about Gone With the Wind, remember -- yet another of my regrettable obsessions. Oi. And it cost like fifteen dollars, which is a lot of babysitting time, Internets.

--I spent at least one trip fully locked into Fake British Accent mode. I think I was fourteen. It was the only way I could talk to cute boys, and cute must = stupid, because I am pretty sure they bought it.

--I went there on a double date once, with SR and his friend and one of my friends I can't remember who it was. It was fun, but the main thing I remember was that "Should I Stay or Should I Go" (I want to say Big Audio Dynamite?) was apparently on endless repeat on the park sound system.

--When we were about twelve, my friend CD's dad took several of us on Kroger Nite, when the company had rented out the whole damn park, which meant there were like 200 people in the place total, so we packed so many rides into three hours that it felt like we were there for days, we OWNED the place, it was AWESOME.

--The Shockwave was the biggest, baddest ride on the lot. A double-loop roller coaster, blue-painted metal rising up beside the highway, the better to entice young Gleemonex anytime we went anywhere near Arlington. It took me years to work up the courage (and the height), but once I did, there might just as well have been no other structure in the joint. Just thinking about it gives me goosebumps -- I want to go to there. Now.

--Probably the most epic trip was when my mom took a gaggle of us (me & CD, my bro and like four of his giant gangly teenage friends) one explosively hot Labor Day weekend (theme: How Many Overheated Un-Sunscreened Human Bodies Can This Park Theoretically Hold? Let Us Find Out!), and despite the fact that we got there when the place opened, the lines were so long we had only actually ridden like three rides by 2:00 p.m., at which point the skies bruised up and then dumped Noah's Fictional Ark-style buckets of thunderous lightning-pocked rain for HOURS. Then we were wet and cold and miserable and Mexico ran out of food and most of the rides were closed for inspection/towel-drying and my bro and his friends disappeared to go to the Night Ranger show in the amphitheater (which had been the point of coming on this day & not another one).

--No matter what, a trip to Six Flags was always, always the absolute single-day highlight of the summer.

------------------------------------------------

*Beyond Fucking Egypt, or, later, Bum-Fuck Egypt. Even churchy kids curse! Sort of!

That which lies buried in the cortex

So I’m by myself in the elevator at work yesterday (and please believe me, I am as christless tired of work, and of talking about work, as you are of hearing about it, but the setting is important because this is where I am supposed to be all professional and shit), and it stops a couple of floors down and a tall, sweet-faced rangy/awkward guy with a corona of blond curls gets in, and (certain of you gals know where this is going) driven by a force I did not realize had such power, my mouth actually began forming the word “Krakow!” This impulse was so strong that a strangulated “k…” sort of came out really quietly as my brain stomped hard on my treacherous sound-maker, going (at neuron-melting speed) “SHUT UP MOUTH! Leave the poor Krakow-bastard alone!”

But then later I was like, come on – you have options for dressing yourself and styling your hair that will not provoke this type of near-ungovernable response in women my age, so really, if the brain had failed to manually override the speaking mechanism, would it really have been my fault? Srsly. Krakow.

About LOST night … (WARNING: SPOILERS!)

Well. Huh.

Soooo … it was … they were all dead? Like from the time of the crash? But then … what’s with the whole Jacob & [MIB] thing? And Desmond wasn’t on the plane, but he’s there? Is Desmond Jesus? Is Jack? MUST someone be, or can we stay out of the realm of Judeo-Christian mythology in our storytelling for goddamn motherfucking once? Did the end HAVE to be in a church (nice touch with the stained-glass window, though)? Does the island actually exist? All along I wanted it to be real, and the people to be alive (until KIA by, say, smoke-tyrannosaurs, EMEs, crazy jungle ladies, or what have you). Although it is strangely comforting to see everyone at peace in the end, more so than I would have thought, with their struggles over and their battles fought. Also I cried a couple of times. SHUT UP, SO DID YOU.

And … but …

Huh.

I just … I mean … like: whaat?

It wasn’t Sopranos, for which I am grateful (because I don’t want to go to jail and probably I would have when the cops caught me going Left-Eye on JJ, Damon & Carlton’s houses as I had sworn to do if they tried any cheapshit monkey business like that), but it wasn’t Wire-worthy either. It was … strange. I’m going to have to sit with it awhile to see if, ultimately, it was satisfying or not. You?

Seth, the world has always been full of whores.

I have two and only two words for you this morning, Internets:

BROWNIE HUSBAND.

I am seriously about to renounce my worldly life and take upon myself the habit and the vows of the Church of Tina Fey, for she is all that is wondrous in this universe.

-----------------------------
*Note: This does not conflict with Shatner as the Deity. He is the All-Knowing, All-Seeing, and it is His light that reveals to us the beauty that is everywhere. Hence, Fey.

Mike Holmes: Godlike man, or actual god in man suit?

Fresh hot new obsesh, y'all. Holmes on Homes.

Somebody done your house wrong? Some lazy good-for-nothin (probably a lush) piece-a-shit contractor drywall over a gigantic skein of live wire, 130 junction boxes (128 of which are totally unecessary) and a mold spore the size of a goddamn Great Dane? Some idiot with a total of four (4) days as a runner on a convenience-store construction site sign on to double your house's square footage (now that the triplets are on their way and also your widowed gramma is moving in), then absconded with the funds and also sued you for $90K more? Fired a crew that you caught replacing your main roof beam with a bunch of taped-together toilet-paper rolls, but they already cashed your checks and now they're so gone, it's like they never existed (sorta like Ian Ziering)?

Mike Holmes will kick ass, take names, put a goddamn vapor barrier on your basement for pete's sake, and bring his guys in (he knows about ... seventy-five guys) to prevent your family from dying in a fire, being crushed under rotted termite-infested timbers, or living forever in raccoon-piss-smelling squalor. And it will look fucking AWESOME. You will weep.

I'm telling you guys: We watched, I think, eight hour-long episodes this weekend. CANNOT GET ENOUGH. MUST HAVE MORE HOLMES. Holmes for President. Holmes for Emperor. Holmes for breakfast.

Dear Shatner Claus:

What do y'all think this'd run me, lease-wise, per month? I'm thinking one around, say, the 50th floor.

My ENTIRE LIFE I've wanted an office in the Empire State Building. My entire life.

TAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAME!

Back to back nights of rocking the fuck OUT is hard on the old bones, y’all. I don’t know how Pixies do it – they’ve all got ten years on me, and they’re out there DOING the actual rocking, night after night for weeks and months in a row, and all I did was stand in the audience and scream my face off while they did it for two of those nights and I am ready to RETIRE to a goddamned NURSING HOME.

Which is to say: If you have the chance to see Kim & Joey & Frank & Dave on their Doolittle tour, I fucking insist that you do so. Do it twice, do it three times – life is too short not to rock as hard as you can.

Mr. November & the Sandman

Or: FUCK YEAH, THE YANKEES!

I really think the trouble in Anaheim was related to that ballpark's weird little celebrity dugout right behind home plate, with Sajak and Chrissy from Three's Company and sundry other semi-recognizable faces all studiously ignoring the BLOODSUCKING GHOUL Boras, who stood there making demon love with his cell phone while he oversaw the proceedings the whole goddamn game. Big ol' floater in the punchbowl, that guy.

But meanwhile: on to the World Series! FUCK YEAH!

Danson machine

Internets, can we please talk about late-career Danson for a second here?

Holy white-haired Shatner, is he awesome! I never thought much about him one way or another, post-Cheers (and even that was mostly on while I was a kid -- I never watched it regularly or anything), and I’m assuming he has giant houses next to his houses just to hold all his F-You money because of his many years of syndicated network TV, so he actually probably never has to get off the couch ever again if he doesn’t want to. So it’s triply awesome how awesome he is.

We started watching Bored to Death mostly because of Schwartzman – the Gleemonex household has a Thing about him, from Phantom Planet and Rushmore and sundry other whatnots. And of course there’s Galligaskin, or whatever, whose abject bearded desperation is as hilarious as it is mesmerizing.

But the revelation – the absolute astonishment – is Ted Fucking Danson. He absolutely owns every scene he’s in, he’s hysterically funny, he’s a complete lizard, you forget he’s a fictional character – you actually even forget it’s someone you know who plays the character. It’s to the point where I almost don’t care what’s happening in the other scenes – just move it along so we can get to the Danson parts, goddammit.

So hey, Danson! Rawk.

The more you know

So watching House the other night, I had one of them there Realizations: If I were watching this show back when I was fifteen, I’d’ve been ALL ABOUT blond prettyboy Chase, the Aussie who seems to feel that shampoo is frankly just not his bag. I might – MIGHT – have spared a thought for Wilson, because fifteen-year-old me has a lovely fireplace in her heart stoked with undying lurve for Dead Poets Society and everything in it except for Meeks and that douche that says “Let Keating fry!” right before he gets his clock righteously cleaned by … oh hell, was it Josh Charles, or Douchebag of the Future Ethan Hawke? Help me out here.

ANYWAY. Point is, Chase looks like a poor man’s Cary Elwes, and that was my type way back then. Blonde, fine-featured, foreign accent, harmless postadolescent prettiness. But now that I know what use those guys are (specifically: none. They are of none use.), 35-year-old me, faced with the buffet of hotness that is House, M.D., would prefer to cut herself a nice big old slab of House himself.

With, ok, a side of Wilson. Eternal flame, doncha know.

Don't let too many monkeys fly out of your butt!

Actual Things Written By My Classmates In My Junior Yearbook, the 1991 Crag, In Which, Oddly, I Mostly Do Remember What the Fuck They're Talking About:
[Part III of a series]

Don’t Dance too hard with Mr. B. at the G’N’R concert!
--girl who, like me, had no idea how that was going to end up

Remember: eat your cereal w/a fork & do your homework in the dark.
--fellow Pump Up the Volume obsessive and Winona Ryder/River Phoenix worshipper - a guy with whom I used to call booze “liquid fun,” who now has an actual TV show, on network TV

I’ll never forget your attitude problem and me, the anarchist pervert. … Chemistry always and forever. … anyways don’t dye your hair black and chop it off.
--Lab Partner (NB: hair comment refs my obsession with Winona Ryder and announced intention, never fulfilled, to get hair like hers & like Samantha Mathis’s in Pump Up the Volume)

Yeah I’m going to be a Looser and cruise the country in my Jeep listening to Eagles, Doors, James Taylor, and Steve Miller. Yeah, so what if it’s a lame dream – I’ll probably end up cruising [Cowburg] County in a bug that doesn’t have a radio. Dreams are good.
--Lab Partner’s sister, now a fine upstanding citizen and architect

OH BABY! I want to lick creme de menthe from his chest
--CK, below a pic of the coach with whom she was … somewhat obsessed

Going to the Regional Science Fair was about the worst thing I have ever done in my life.
--CK, who knew I would’ve found it so myself

I’ve watched you over the years and you have gotten prettier every year! Now you are a beautiful young woman.
--some girl I absolutely cannot place, but whose comment now sort of creeps me out

Who knows where it will go [“it” being the fact that we kissed once], how long it will last [bout two more months, at which point I found a boyfriend who didn't say stuff like that] or if I will live past 25 [holy Shatner, dramatic much?].
--guy with whom I was in the last phase of obsession; same Facebook philosopher as in the previous installment of this series of posts

Have a great congressional summer and try not to get mugged by Mike Tyson too many times.
--future member of the Dirty Dozen, re: my upcoming summer in D.C. as a Congressional Page

Everybody looks better on the island

SPOILER-FREE SURVIVOR-RELATED POST

You know how on Survivor, everybody always shows up to the finale/reunion thingy all glammed out and painted up, with their hair did and their nails on and their teeth whitened and their chassis freshly waxed and buffed? It’s always kind of weird and bizarre to see them like that. I find it really, seriously off-putting. I get used to seeing these thinner, un-gilded, natural-looking people, and as if by bad magick, they’re all back to being doughy, tarted-up American wannabe actors.

you can see them out for dinner / with their piggy wives / clutching forks and knives / to eat the bacon

TOP TWENTY MOST INFLUENTIAL ALBUMS IN GLEEMONEX HISTORY
Part IV of IV (first three are here, here and here)

All Beatles, all the time. Y’all, I don’t think I can overstate the importance of the Beatles in my life. They were always kind of around at my house, but I didn’t really discover them for myself until I was eleven or so. I’m pretty sure the documentary The Compleat Beatles hipped me to how cute they all were, and then I started bogarting the vinyl from my dad’s stereo cabinet, and then the clipping started (I would buy or steal ANYTHING that had photos of them on it, then slice it to ribbons for collages), and the buying my own reissued vinyl, the calling myself [Firstname] Starr in school, the um … fanfic? I wrote?, the posters that blanketed my bedroom walls, the repeated obsessive viewings of A Hard Day’s Night, the videos I made with my sister in which we jumped around to play all four Fabs, the junior high English accent fakery, the Sgt. Pepper-y jacket I wore throughout high school, the repeated obsessive viewings of the Anthology series (maybe or maybe not with herbal jazz refreshment), the naming of my daughter after the one whose birthday she shares, and of course the time Jessica Blehm and I tried to call Paul McCartney from a pay phone on the Reunion grounds in the middle of the night in July 1987.

So, in no particular order:

Revolver (1966)
This is when the drugs really began to take hold – and it shows. I lost track of how many times I listened to this lying on the floor of my bedroom sophomore year of high school, stereo speakers blasting directly into my ears, lights out and tripping on nothing stronger than Coca-Cola and teen angst. From that cigarette cough on “Taxman” to the last feedback seagull on “Tomorrow Never Knows,” minus Paul’s silly wankings (“For No One” is the worst offender; “Rigby” is only good if you strip out the vocals like on Anthology), this is a goddamn near perfect album.

White Album (1968)
A little something for everyone, and it’s disintegration in action -- all the boys going different directions no matter how much it hurts. You know how large-scale destruction, like a building imploding or a war at night, can be fucking beautiful? It’s like that. Gleemonex Fun Fact: Desmond, Sadie and Julia were all on the baby-name short list because of this album.

Sgt. Pepper (1967)
They invented this shit out of whole cloth – nobody thought of such a king-hell fuckaround before the Beatles did it. I’ve never done acid, but Pepper made me want to. Such weird/downer material wrapped in such a trippy, lovely package. Gleemonex Fun Fact: My little drunken band of friends has tried to play Sgt. Pepper all the way through at the end of the night several times; Mr. Gleemonex, the Drumming Lebowski and I once got as far as “Mr. Kite” before the rest of the band got bored and wandered off.

Abbey Road (1969)
The whole album is like something really awesome happening the day after you’ve had a massive hangover. Your headache is gone, but you’re still a little logy, and you vaguely remember some raging good times and maybe a fight or something – whatever, it’s all good and you have this beautiful thing now. “Mean Mr. Mustard” is like my theme song in life.

A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
The best of the pre-drug best (and I do love me some early Beatles; it’s just that the first few are so full of “standard” covers that they don’t really make the list as full original albums).This one’s where George Martin started to trust the boys, a little bit. I don’t use the word “exuberance” a lot, but Internets? This is it – you can’t listen to this record without dancing around like a maniac, your heart just about lifting out of your goddamn chest.

So that's it, kids -- and it was harder than I thought to pick just five from the Fabs. Sometime soon I'll do a brief overall Honorable Mention post, along with "Goddamn, I can't believe I forgot ____!" Hope you enjoyed this stroll through the back catalog of Gleemonex Records.

And the cards are / no good that you're holding / unless they're / from another world

TOP TWENTY MOST INFLUENTIAL ALBUMS IN GLEEMONEX HISTORY
Part II of IV [I is here]

Bootleg Series, vol.1-3 (Bob Dylan, 1991)
I went to the mall with my grandmother, who – just because that’s how she rolled – bought me an entire stereo system, complete with 6-CD changer. She also insisted I get something new to play in it, so, being a big ol’ Bob Dylan fan, I went with Rolling Stone’s recommendation and bought this 3-disc set. I played it all spring and summer long, and it’s still one of my faves; best tracks are “Blind Willie McTell” and “Series of Dreams.”

Pretty Hate Machine (Nine Inch Nails, 1989)
Ohhh, kids. How the little white middle-class suburban high-schooler longed to pretend she was not a member of the Methodist Youth Fellowship, but rather a hard, gritty cynical tough grrl with a nihilist streak a mile wide, and ohhh, how she played this disc again and again and again and wrote bits of the lyrics all over everything for like THREE YEARS …

Footloose soundtrack (Various artists, 1984)
My second non-Muppet-related musical obsession. I had the LP of this, then the cassette tape, and y’all. Y’ALL. Permanently burned into all the nooks and crannies of my brain tissue, this one, at a time when the crenellations were still forming.

OK Computer (Radiohead, 1997)
This soundtracked my time in exile – the 20 months Mr. Gleemonex and I spent on the moonscape of west central Texass while I was in grad skool. We had a lot of fun there, but it was just such a strange part of our lives. We roasted our own spices to make garam masala, we drank a lot of Lone Star out by the pool, we watched Dazed and Confused sixteen hundred more times, we drove to Dallas to see Empire Strikes Back, we made plans to move to San Francisco (sight unseen, on my part), we listened to OK Computer.

One Chord to Another (Sloan, 1996)
When we weren’t in the mood for people bitching about some guy who buzzes like a fridge, like a de-tuned radio, we listened to the Beatle-y bopping-around sounds of Sloan, Nova Scotia’s finest. It never fails to lift the mood.

Everybody talking to their pockets, everybody wants a box of chocolates and a long-stem rose

I have developed a pretty serious Internets crush on this gal, and y’all, no one but her (she?) could inspire me to go on ahead and make a list inspired by something on FB. And of course I have no choice but to do it her way. So:

TOP TWENTY MOST INFLUENTIAL ALBUMS IN GLEEMONEX HISTORY
Part I of IV

Disintegration (The Cure, 1989)
Maybe I was late to the Cure party, but when I got there, this was playing. Over and over and over and over and over. I was fifteen. The time was right. Desperation, longing, loveliness, twelve songs that made me feel briefly like someone who did not, in fact, own any acid-wash jeans OR listen to this in the car on the way to see Cocktail at the Golden Triangle Mall. Which I did. Shut up. So did you.

Girlfriend (Matthew Sweet, 1991)
I was pretty sure I was going to meet and immediately marry Matthew Sweet. I almost named my kid Evangeline (seriously, it was on the short list, in 2007. Thus is the Power of the Sweet).

Appetite for Destruction (Guns n’ Roses, 1987)
Didn’t get into Axl n’ Pals till a couple of years after this came out, but converts are always the worst zealots. {Berwie, HHL, Lab Partner, Kingfish – good times, y’all, good times. The Incident till makes a fun lil’ story, 18 years later, don’t it?}

Thriller (Michael Jackson, 1983)
My first musical obsession that wasn’t Muppet-related. People, I made a fan club. I convinced myself he’d be stopping by to see me at school one day, to thank me for starting a fan club.

Pump Up the Volume [soundtrack] (various artists, 1990)
You know, back when we lived in a little town without a music store and didn’t have the Internets or a driver’s license and/or husbands who kept us hooked into the new-music synapse chain, we learned about “alternative” music from 94.9 THE EDGE, or else soundtracks from movies that starred a pre-be-hairplugged Xtian Slater. Concrete Blonde (and L. Cohen, in a roundabout way), Henry Rollins, Sonic Youth, Soundgarden, Cowboy Junkies, the fucking PIXIES!!!! Ho shit. I wore this tape the fuck OUT.

PS: Don't worry, bitches, I'll get to the Beatles at some point. People who name their kids after one of them are clearly influenced by the Fabs, OK? Chill your shit.