30 to Life

  Back in 1984 I met this girl who didn't have a cell phone.  So in order to communicate with her I had to have a government worker come to my house, pick up my text message, take it to a facility where they dumped it into a sorting machine with everyone else's text messages, then they bagged it up and had another federal employee hand deliver it to her house.  The elegant process which set me back 20 cents, took at least two days to get my text to her house 20 miles away. These days it only takes 4 hours to get a message to Neptune.  Anyway, in one of the early texts (perhaps even the first one)  I sent her some of the lyrics to this song.

XTC - Rocket From a Bottle

   Two years later, in fact 30 years ago this very day, I started making payments on a sofa and a girl. That day I sang this next song to her in front of both of our families and a few close friends.

Clash - Death or Glory

     In December 2011 during the 14th hour of a 16 hour drive, with resentment building between us, this song came on my car's mp3 player.  It was as if we were in a bad movie with a great soundtrack and the perfect perspective inducing song started playing .  As I sang it to her I got it through my head that it's not her fault that I'm a  ________ (fill in the blank).  I don't think she even realized that I was singing it to her, but I felt calmer while she seethed.  All I can say is that we made great time while she was pondering false-imprisonment charges.

Matthew Sweet - Sick of Myself

  Word has it that my parole hearing scheduled for today has been postponed indefinitely. Yay?