Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Drinking While Shopping = Mistake

It was a bad idea to start drinking this evening.

I think it's because I do it so rarely these days that when I break down and open a beer or have a Scotch, it feels like an event. So far tonight, I finished the Stella Artois I had in the fridge, singled out the lone bottle of Blue Moon, and have since moved on to the Guinness tucked away at the back of my fridge. Granted, my consumption isn't much compared to those who imbibe on a more regular basis, but I'm still at the point of feeling like I could be comfortable with some bad decisions.

First buzzed decision of the night is that I should really do this more often. Life is to short to be completely sober for all of it. Most of it, sure...but not all of it. I'll work on that. We all have room for improvement, and right now I'm convinced that the hole in my life could be filled with more beer. What of it?

Second, I need a record player. That's right, a good old fashioned record player so I can have a vinyl collection.

First and foremost, I'm a collector, so the idea of putting together a vinyl collection is way appealing. Second, there is just something beautiful and nostalgic about it. When I was a kid, my father had a massive collection of LP's. Granted, he was into Southern Gospel, arguably the worst music ever put on wax, but still...I remember going through those albums as a kid. There was something about the over sized artwork and the large booklets that sometimes came inside that was so appealing.

I still remember going into my local mall as a young boy, and seeing vinyl on the racks. The pictures were amazing to me. Kiss decked out in suits for the "Dressed to Kill" cover. Jimi Hendrix's over the top psychedelia of "Axis". Strangely, the album cover that stuck with me the most was the cover of Queen's "News of the World". That giant robot with the dead bodies in the palm of its hand grabbed me, and I remember being thrilled and intimated by it all at once. With my conservative Christian upbringing, that lone image was enough to incite all sorts of feelings I knew I shouldn't be having.



Hell, kids. I remember being young in a small Nazarene church in Hebron, Ohio when they brought in a special Evangelist to discuss the dangers of "back-masking" in popular music. This was, of course, the supposedly popular practice of musicians where they would inbed messages into their albums that could only be discerned when played backwards. Said messages would then prompt you to smoke marijuana (Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust", I believe) or to "Just do it" (Judas Priest's "Stained Class" or Nike...I can't remember any longer). This man actually played records backwards to us causing a sound of warped noise to fill the church, an essentially creepy sound to begin with, and then would have to translate the garbled mess to us all so we could be sufficiently scared.

So tonight, when searching through some stuff on Best Buy, I realized just how many amazing albums are available on vinyl now and it brought all of this back. Hell yeah. I want a collection. I want Queen to convince me to get high, or Radiohead to recommend a good anti-depressant. I need Judas Priest to tell me to do anything. Fucking anything for Rob Halford, just name it, sir. I want the big album art and the big rich sound of vinyl in my house.

Don't hate. Your house if full of useless shit too. Look around.

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