K-Town and Sadlack's - A Tribute

I was born in Raleigh, North Carolina on July 22, 1977 at the Old Rex Hospital that once sat at the corner of Wade Avenue and St. Mary's Street. My earliest childhood memories, as long-time readers of my blog may be able to affirm, are saturated with the landmarks and buildings of the capital city that have been around much longer than I. Over the years some of these buildings still stand, some have seen remodels or changed locations entirely; others are long gone. One of my long standing stories that I tend to tell from time to time is that when I first got my license in 1993, against the express instructions from my parents not to do so, I drove straight into downtown Raleigh and began what would become my 20 year run of hanging out at Cup a Joe on Hillsborough Street (And it should come as no surprise, this is where I sit now, writing this to you).

36 years of Hillsborough street... I have many memories... some highlights...

1983, NCSU wins the NCAA championship... my dad, an NCSU Alumni decides he must take his family on a cruise up H-boro to celebrate with his comrades. My mom's car at the time, an ancient royal blue escort, is splashed and coated with red latex paint on the passenger side. In my skewed kid-memory, the streets and everything surrounding is snow-white with toilet paper, anything not covered in TP is on fire.

I persist in begging my parents to take us to “That place with the cherry on top!” ...an ice cream parlor on the corner of Dan Allen called Swanson's(?). I distinctly remember once making the decision to order “bubble gum” ice cream and being furiously irritated as there were actual pieces of gumballs in it and ice cream shouldn't be work.

Riding back towards the fairgrounds from the old Darryl's on the corner of Hboro and Oberlin and my dad points out the prostitutes waiting around at the corner of Chamberlain.

My mom works in her salon on Saturday mornings and dad take my brother and I on his errands to local hardware stores, etc., and we typically stop for lunch at Char-Grill beside the old church and eat our Jr Steakburgers on the tailgate of the truck.

Home from college (ECU) to hang out with friends still in town... They have decided to do acid, I am the DD, as I am too scared to try it. We walk up and down Hillsborough, from the Electric Co Mall to Sadlack's... My friend swears the bricks are full of water and the sky is full of angels.

A quiet Tuesday morning and no one is in Cup but me, a few older guys that seem to live here, and my friend Dawn. Several moments go by with no cars on the road and a lone tumbleweed rolls down the center of Hboro St.

IHOP on the corner of Ashe at 3am with an ex-boyfriend... A homeless man comes in and proceeds to drink all 4 tabletop syrups and lies down on the floor beneath the booth and falls asleep.

Endless hours of Frankenstein pinball at the Fast Fare or Funhouse pinball at the pizza place beside Foundation's Edge.

A gutterpunk named Suede tries to sell us cassette tapes he found in the trash behind Schoolkid's.

My friends have somehow managed to shimmy their way onto the roof of Cupajoe and are throwing jumping jacks from the roof and shooting off roman candles.

And now most of these places are gone. The Comet, The Brewery, Pantana's, to name a few. And now one more to add to the list... Sadlack's. It is a painful loss, but before the doors shut, in true hometown honor-system, Raleigh rallied and sent this quasi-shabby, shitsqualor manor of mayhem and drunken foolishness off to the great dive bar in the sky in ...er.... well... style...? A full week (or so) of what I called “Last Call Rock Shows.” I did my best to show face and throw some more cash in the till before it was all over.

Sadlack's sat at the corner of Enterprise and Hillsborough, across from the iconic NCSU Belltower. In my teens and early 20s Sad's was actually not the place you would hang out... In fact, I was warned against it by my father. My crowd were usually at the Comet or Stingray (later on, everyone migrated to Jackpot and then eventually downtown to Landmark/Neptunes/Captial Club). Sadlack's throughout the 80's and 90's had a pretty rough reputation. And before the Great Remodel a few years back had perhaps the smallest, most terrifying bathrooms I've ever experienced. Being situated only a block or two from all the Ghetto-blaster room-for-rent Shrader properties and around the corner from the blood for cash donation center, the assumption was that Sadlack's was basically the vortex for all the homeless or may-as-well-be-homeless gutterpunks and lost souls. The joke goes that Sad's is where Cup a Joe went after close or that it was the official AA Meeting afterparty. It wasn't until my friends decided to quirkily gentrify (sorta kinda) Maiden Lane (and inadvertently, temporarily all became coke addicts,) did I start half-heartedly wandering up to hang out on the patio. Then the glorious advent of Hopscotch and the convenient fact that I had moved into a duplex near the Rose Garden, within walking distance myself, saw me spending more and more time with Raleigh's own island of misfit toys.

Now, I know to the untrained eye, (or those unfamiliar with Karla-speak) you may misconstrue that I am talking smack about Sadlack's and those that chose to spend their time there – I'm mostly trying to explain why it took so long for me to warm up to it. And how once I figured out it was basically, second only to Cupajoe for me, Homeroom for Underdogs and how I started aligning myself with them folks. God knows I love an underdog.

The announcement of the closing came so long ago, so long before I left for Costa Rica in fact, that I had almost forgotten it was coming. And it wasn't until the last few weeks, once we officially saw the 3rd-ish incarnation of Schoolkids close beside it, that reality began to sink in. It was really happening. Suddenly things started happening... The Raleigh music scene remembered its rusty roots of afternoon no one shows on the patio, NCSU alumni who spent their sunny Saturday afternoons came out to reminisce, and the same old freakshow drunks who'd been there since the dawn of time were in full force. I made three “official” stopovers.

Dexter Romweber – 12/22/13

Dex, of Flat Duo Jets fame, started off with an early solo set around 6pm. I hadn't 100% planned on this show, but I was in the general vicinity and I was rocking a solo Sunday Funday and didn't quite feel like wandering down to Landmark, so I made a detour and I'm glad I did. Dexter played for a bit, rested a bit and then picked it back up. I saw great friends and got some serious toe-tapping on. Later I snagged his setlist, which was actually written on the back of an old power bill, which seemed almost intrusive but I got his permission to add it to my ever-increasing setlist collection.

Scores from the past couple weeks in the door of my car. This is getting out of control. kinda.

MARTEEEEEEN!

Kenny Roby & Friends – 12/28/13 (aka The Official Shit-Starts-Gettin'-Rowdy show)

Now this was epic. A Saturday night show, packed to the gills with who's who of the long standing Triangle Americana scene and old school Six String Drag fans. This was a two-fisted tallboy show; a-hootin' and a-hollerin', unexpected covers, surprise special guests and encore after encore kinda gig. Easily one of the best shows I've seen since I got back to town. Toe tapping gave way to eventual gratuitous head-bobbing, morphing seamlessly into full scale dancing, eventually seeing us dancing on the tables, then ...aw fuckit, down front, in front of everybody danceparty!!! There was more love and good vibes on that patio than I have seen in a Raleigh crowd... man, you know, I almost said “years” but honestly? I think EVER?

Damn the Man

I ARE FAN

Gettin' Goner With It

Yeah, That happened!!

More shows were scheduled after this one, (including the Backsliders on New Year's Eve that I very briefly stopped in for one last adieu,) but in my heart I knew nothing would ever come as close to this as sheer live show perfection at Sadlack's and I wanted it to be my last memory of the place, not the shambles I knew it would become as the evening wore on and revelers would tear the place to pieces, nuts and bolts, the way they did on the “first” last night of Jackpot when folks were walking past Q's place on Morgan carrying pool sticks and bar stools. My last memory of the night is watching as some friends lit a Chinese fire lantern loose and it floated dreamily into the sky.

photo courtesy of Johnny of House of Swank

photo courtesy of Johnny of House of Swank

photo courtesy of Johnny of House of Swank

January 1, 2014 saw the end of Sadlack's. The facebook page was flooded with love, support and memories. Local publications published tributes and locals took photos of the boarded up windows in memorial to good times gone by.

Three days later, one of my dear friends, Carole, celebrated her birthday with her husband, friends, and family. Early the next day we learned the terrible news that Matt, her husband, her truest love and longest friend, our friend, our love, had passed away tragically, unexpectedly... I had been, as I tend to do, procrastinating with writing this "tribute to Sadlack's" post, (perhaps waiting for the flood of other media outlet articles to fade out,) but in the wake of this devastating news I knew that the best thing I could do for myself and perhaps for my friends who are hurting as much as I am for these two people who have touched so many lives in such a deep and loving way, was to dedicate this post to them. As with what has been the case with the majority of the posts found in this blog, I sit here holding back tears, spewing catharsis. 

Carole has been a deeply important person in my life for many years, floating in and out like a guardian angel when I am my deeply saddest and most lost; seemingly knowing exactly what to say and the right way to say it to pull me out of wherever it is my soul is trying to retreat. Not to say that I am some deeply enigmatic and nihilistic soul with no way through my crabby crustacean shell, but the universe (G-d? Who knows anymore?) has always found a way to set such transcendental and casually rational souls such as Carole into my path. One of my fondest memories is a random evening when she and Blinker showed up at Jackpot in full clown regalia after I had just barely met her and she enveloped me in one of the warmest and best hugs I can recall in real life, as if she had known and loved me her whole life.

Matt was someone I met when I staarted to meet Raleigh Kids outside of high school overflow. I had started spending my time with the notorious Rob Roy and he spent lots of time with this group of folks that circled around the kids Jenny (Wood!), Chris, Nancy (Brown!) and Matt, (who we called K-town, as he was from Kinston). Rob called him his “lawyer” ...Matt once posed as his attorney to get him out of a traffic ticket ages ago (this may have been a joke, but we still called him K-Town: Attorney at Law for years.) Time passed, folks moved on, “cliques” faded, merged, melted into one... I'd find myself at parties with crews of folks I'd never pick out of a lineup to know each other. I'd be on Bart's stoop on Chamberlain with hippies, punks, hipsters, art fags and sorority girls and I never knew how we all knew each other, but it was there that K-town came back into my life and Carole became a life-preserver and one of my soul's strongest advocates.

I am having trouble keeping it together now, as I am writing this in public and it's not in my best interest to break down at Cupajoe, so I will end this by saying that not since losing our dear friend Sean “Old School” Johnson a few years back, has my soul ached so badly for the loss of a friend. I have no comforting words for Carole or their family at the moment, (as I am stuck somewhere between the extreme anger/helpless grief phase myself,) and I don't ask you for yours. I would just ask that whoever you are, whether or not you know these two beautiful people, that you take a moment to revel in their love and feel blessed to know that such people like this existed on this planet in your lifetime. And if you get a moment, send a loving burst of hope and comfort to Carole, the kids, and their family.

Services for Matt will be this Saturday afternoon, the 11th, with a reception to follow at their home. Feel free to contact me at karlaanne@gmail If you would like to coordinate carpooling or need directions.


Donations for the family can be made here.

Mud Boggin' - Gray Young & Over-Sharing

Have you ever gotten you car stuck in mud? If you live in the more rural parts of Raleigh/Wake County or even further out, then the answer is most likely "yes".

I was born off St Mary's street, grew up off Lake Wheeler Road and later lived on the Apex side of Cary. Somehow, winding up in Cary with an Apex address lead to a High School career in Fuquay-varina. My extended family, basically everyone but my brother and I, a total of some 30ish first cousins, all live in Mount Airy, NC; aka Mayberry.  Trips "home" to Mt Airy to see family, were almost akin to safaris for my brother and I. We had grown up inside the beltline; we had access (via our parents) to infinite fast food choices and more than one grocery store. Our cousins grew up in 3 bedroom houses with 8 occupants, on farms, barefoot. mountain people. Part of us, my brother and I, were mortified at the savageness of their lives; i remember being almost a pre-teen before my grandmother got cable. My cousins would entertain us by driving us around (me horrified) on ATVs and playing hide and seek in tobacco barns. Fishing. Catching frogs.  Someone as dainty and skittish as me, was mostly terrified of 99% of the activities I found myself involved in on those trips home; my brother, who was decidedly more athletic and lithe than I (I was a total porker; focused only on beating the book club goals and playing the piano) loved these weekends home. he and my other male cousins would build fires and beat each other with wooden planks; i have no idea. I, along with my cousin Crystal, were the two youngest of the cousins. we were the babies. We would hide out in the back of my folks' minivan and play with Barbies. we were friends by default. What i mostly remember about these trips home was A) the dread of what horrendous activity involved wading in a creek was ure to arise and B) once again feeling like a total outcast, even in my own family.

My point here is this, despite the fact that I have never once in my almost 36 years, camped, or slept outdoors in any fashion, despite never once having ridden a horse, never once been in a physical fight; I know a little bit about mud. If only by proxy of my crazy redneck family. There was always a part of me that would dip a toe in the crazy pool, give it a shot, see if the rough and tumble world of the Appalachian way was in me somewhere. But any sign of potential danger or stains, and I was out. I would go crying back to my perpetually perturbed mother or my bored shitless dad, dozing on the couch. I spent 10% of every trip to mount airy as a child feeling brave and daring and the other 90% hiding in a corner with a book.

Flash forward whatever many years; we moved to the Apex-not-apex address and I was bussed to Fuquay. Again, I was entirely out of my element. The majority of my classmates, despite having grown up only 30 minutes away from me, were like aliens to me. I had never seen kids wear camouflage to school before. I never saw so many day glow orange hunting caps. Surrounded by kids, having grown up in literally the same county as I, and I couldn't understand their accents. There was more twang and drawl than I had ever heard,even in Mt Airy. As I grew and meandered into high school, I became a weirdo, or in those times, what we called "alternative". I hung out with kids who parted their hair in the middle, wore flannel and airwalks. we listened to the pixies and put beads in our hair and saved up money for lollapalooza.  We were, I have to stress, the extreme minority of that school. Although I was a fat weirdo, I did somehow manage to make friends with most everybody in that school, I would say. mostly because I didn't care. I didn't want anyone judging me, so i didn't judge anyone else. so there was, on the rare occasion, situations that arose where my best friend Christy and I would find ourselves in the baffling company of rednecks. (I never understood why Christy dated the guys she did, especially as I never went on Date One in high school, but every once in a while, she dated a redneck.) We found ourselves, on more than one occasion, doing weird shit like mud bogging. Also, it serves to be said that Fuquay, in the early 90s, was still pretty damned rural and only had a McDonalds and an ancient Harris Teeter. There were hundreds of unpaved roads. I, in my stylin' 1984 shit-brown cavalier convertible, found myself stuck in mud several times throughout my mostly innocuous high school career.

Why the history lesson? Well, yesterday Allie Brosh, of hyperbole and a half, posted a new entry about her struggle with depression. 5 people total forwarded this to me, and two things became suddenly, abundantly clear; A) it is no longer a "secret" that I am struggling with severe depression and have been for about a year now and B) it must be a trait of those of us with major depression to fulfill this compulsive need for allegory/parables/explanation... To give others around us a metaphor for what our sadness is like. This last post by Brosh is probably the closest I've ever heard anyone other than myself explain what I'm feeling (or, not feeling to be blunt) and a lot more interesting than my comparison;  feeling like my car-brain is stuck in the mud and no matter how much my friends or family try to stuff twigs or leaves under my wheels and tell me to gun it in reverse, I keep spinning my wheels, digging my car-brain further and further into the mire. Or, you know, what Allie said, better and with cute cartoons.

Part of the history lesson is also to reiterate the fact that I'm okay all alone. which is what has come to be a harsh reality over the past month or so. I terminated my romantic relationship, mostly due to the fact that I feel like a black hole of emotion and i have nothing left in me and I kinda just want to lie alone on the couch with my cat and burn through my netflix queue, eating american cheese slices straight from the packet and stop shaving my legs. So yes, burned the relationships bridge, tried to repair the previous relationship's bridge, and burnt that one beyond even dental recognition. then had my closest adult friend terminate her friendship with me, for completely valid reasons and i felt nothing. I am a big ole feelin' nothing kinda gal at the moment. I wake up, I go to work, or i don't. I have gone several days in a row when I have said little more than three or four phrases out loud. The only things I've found remotely interesting are the increasing diversity and perfection of my various Spotify playlists and going to see Gray Young. I told you before, i don't get to see U2 three times in one month, I get to see Gray Young. There aren't any bands other than the biggest band in the world and these three dudes i see almost every day that stir the kind of joy and solace in my pruney, shrivelled, numbed-out heart.

Back to the history of it all for a minute. there are certain conversations in my life that stick out like sore thumbs that my shitty brain will never let me forget. some are mundane and banal. some are horrifyingly embarrassing. some are bittersweet. I am reminded of two very important conversations as of late. The first was with my dad, when I was elementary or middle school-ish. I had realized, suddenly, that it might be a problem that I was fat; this "disability" was going to prejudice the majority of girls straining to define their coolness or dudes that would maybe kiss me behind the bleachers. I remember one of the first times I was bullied for being overweight. I cried. and it wasn't because this was painful or new information of any kind; I had been overweight my entire life... It was because I was confused. I will, 99% of the time, if you know me, cry because I am confused. and I, being the existentially overly sensitive, over thinker that I am, always believed that people were so much better than they chose to be, or chose to behave... I cried every time I was bullied, which was pretty much par for the course, even into my adulthood, because I just couldn't believe people could be so blindly cruel. Why? Why would anyone say such mean things to someone? Why would they judge me based solely on my physical appearance? My dad had picked me up from some after school function and we were almost all the way home when i burst into tears and told my dad "I don't have any friends. I don't think people like me because I'm fat" and he told me something to the effect that I would have to work harder to be interesting and smarter and I would prove them all wrong. In the mean time, I'd have to learn how to be happy alone; that one day things like that wouldn't matter... maybe.

The second conversation occurred about oh, 4 or 5 years ago? My best friend, in counseling me after yet another heartbreak, told me that she dreaded the day that all the optimism and hope was finally gone out of me; that she was worried there was going to come a day when i finally gave so much of myself to others that i didn't leave anything else for myself and I stopped believing in love. I can't help but wonder if the big part of why she made the decision to end our friendship was because it finally happened... I don't have anything left. i broke my own heart too many times. I waited too long for my "one day" and I'm out of options. I stopped believing in true love. It has taken a toll on me; emotionally, psychologically, physically, socially... I gave up on love, the one and only thing I ever believed in, so I gave up on me. When someone stops caring about themselves, it's hard and exhausting to keep reassuring them and trying to fill in the void... I understand completely...

So what's left? I think we all have bucket lists; either we wrote them down or we keep them somewhere in our brains. I wrote them all down, of course. Preposterous bullshit like visit the great wall of China.. I filled it with seemingly innocent hopes that now seem as impossible as "grow a tail"... Get married to my best friend? Have at least two kids? these are not things that seem like options anymore. I don't even cry about them anymore. I shut it all out, i shut myself down. I obsess over Spotify and I get drunk and I go to rock shows to feel some sort of something for just a minute.

The first of the two times I saw gray young this past month was at the CD release party at King's. I had, along with my ex, made Kitten Army fan club buttons. I was way too drunk, way too soon. Dana and I stood front and center and It was amazing.

the second time was during a benefit at tir na nog that tamplin threw together. Birds and arrows played first, then bronzed chorus again, then the boys. before this show, Dana and I had another one of our patented "oh god I'm so glad someone loves them as much as i do" conversations and she reminded me of the post i had made forever ago about how sometimes when i see them play, it's like poking a bruise. And a little spark of light lit up my pitch black heart for just a second and reminded me, yes. that pain is better than numb. and part of the reason i like gray young so much, is the bittersweet undertones of their music. there is literally no emotion in the world i love more than bittersweet.

I don't know if' I've made a point to emphasize that on here or not, but the best music there is, is the ones that take you so far back in your brain that you remember smells and shadows and the slightest graze of your fingertips over a memory or a love you will never have back. your grandmother's last hug, your lover's last kiss, the last sweep of your fingers through the fur of your childhood dog... whatever it is. music is the time machine; gray young has the power over me to create a song I have never heard that takes me to a different point in my life and replay the moments I'll never have again and thank god i get one more second with my friend before he died in a car wreck, or i get one more moment with my fingers splayed in the soft blonde hair across his chest before he wakes, I get that rainy Saturday morning in the house i grew up in with my brother, before the world broke us. gray young is a time machine. At this show, one of my more favorite Gray Young moments happened; I was standing front and center-ish and i must have had my eyes closed for a while and suddenly something swatted me in the face. I opened my eyes and chas was right in front of me and one of his guitar strings had popped me in the face. It was an almost painful jump back into the present... I don't know where I had gone or how long I had been missing, but I went somewhere during that show and it literally took chas smacking me in the face with his guitar to bring me back. That's pretty fucking powerful. that says more about how deep the river of my love and respect for their music flows than anything else i could write...

I'm not quite sure how to end this. I have done a lot of... sharing... on this post. I don't mind, it helps to purge every once in a while. I'm a big believer in catharsis, as many past readers know. And I don't think it's much of a secret to anyone anymore that I struggle with depression. or alcohol. or that I was once morbidly obese. or that I was in an abusive relationship and almost died. or that I loved a boy. or I loved a band. that I had beautifully patient and understanding friends that loved me as much as they could before i couldn't let them anymore. i don't mind you knowing. I don't mind being broken... i have a gray young show to look forward to. And that's something. It's enough for today.

see you on the patio.

The Beatles - Yellow Submarine

I promise you this; you will never ride in a car with me and let a Beatles song come on the radio where I don’t explain their significance in my musical education. I will nearly always explain the same things: The Beatles taught me to sing. I am completely incapable of hearing or singing along with any Beatles song and not singing the harmony. The Beatles explained the execution of harmony before I even understood what it meant. Then, if you’re really lucky and I’m feeling chatty, I may go into the story of my childhood Saturday mornings with you.

My dad is a total Technophile. Or, he mostly was, now he’s just a slow-paced retiree with a golf addiction (we still love him) but he still has that 80s-esque yuppie compulsion to have the newest gadgets. I can remember when the first VCR came into our house. It was one of those gigantic ancient bad boys that was the size of a small coffee table. This was also back in the day before the production companies had released the licensing on cassettes, so very few places actually *sold* VCR tapes, only rented them. Of which, until I was older there was only one place that actually rented them; it was called Video1 in South Hills Mall; I think its part of a bridal shop now. But the point is, back when tapes were still scarce, they were purchasable, but viciously expensive; $80? $75? … a lot. Dad bought a few. I remember kinda feeling like hot shit because not only did my family have a VCR but we actually had TAPES. Dad bought the most random things… Patton, first of all (his favorite movie), Teen Wolf (what? Why?) And Yellow Submarine. Also Tommy got in there somehow at some point. Of course. (Reminder to self to write a post about Tommy.)

I was raised on the musical. My dad, in addition to being a Motown junky and a classic rock aficionado, was also inexplicably very into musicals… this is one of those million reasons why I always joke that my dad is gay. (Ps my dad is actually the antithesis of gay; he just has very funny things like this about him that I love to pick on him for.) (Ps again – I don’t know how I just made this connection, but this fact about my dad is most likely the predominate reason why I went to college for Musical Theater Performance. Durr.) So there was a big portion of the record collection I gleaned from my dad that was Rogers and Hammerstein and Andrew Lloyd Webber stocked. I listened to Jesus Christ Superstar and Tommy more than just about any other records in that collection. I’m not even sure if you would consider Yellow Submarine a musical (I would) or just a really long music video.

Of the vinyl I inadvertently hoarded away from my dad, there are 2 albums I am most emotionally connected to. The red and blue albums. The “best of”s I suppose. I used to sit in the floor turning those albums over and over again, watching the boys age before my eyes. Dad had sat down and recorded most of his vinyl, these albums included, onto cassette tape, and these tapes were probably played more on those Saturday mornings that any other one thing. My brother and I would ride around with Pop on these Saturdays singing our hearts out and I felt in my soul that harmonizing was the right thing to do; no one explained to me how or why to do it. (This was my Mozart playing thirds moment, I suppose?) It is impossible for me to listen to any Beatles song without singing the harmony. I joke that the Beatles taught me to sing.

I went today to see the new biopic about John Lennon, Nowhere Boy, in the theater. It was pretty spot on and was shot in all the right places. It was basically the telling of John’s childhood/early teens up until Hamburg. (Digression: it really amused me that there were so many people in the audience who didn’t know his story? Growing up with Aunt Mimi and that his mom died after being hit with a car? The gasping horror emitted by the majority of the audience made me kinda roll my eyes a bit… I wanted to be like, “people. Why are you here? Did you not know this shit already? Spoiler alert. Duh.”) As I stated in my facebook status update, I really only got weepy at the end, as the credit rolled there was a slideshow of childhood pictures, leading up the Quarrymen, which included babyfaced pictures of Paul and George. (I will have no hesitation telling you George is my favorite Beatle. Inside and out, I love that man on an atmospheric level. Missed forever… xoxo) so yeah, I forget that people don’t get as ‘involved’ with their favorite artists; needing to know entire biographies and meanings to certain songs. Also, having spent such a significant amount of time in Liverpool (story for later?) It was really cool to relive these places that I saw in the film again.

I have struggled off and on with my dedication/admiration of John Lennon. Yes, there are a bazillion reasons to love him, but there are those 2 or 3 little things that he did in his life that make me snarl a little. This movie helped humanize a little more of those things that bugged the crap of me about him, so that’s good. Also the boy playing him in the movie was so balistically hot, especially towards the end with those big ole black frame glasses and pea coat (so much how I like my men. [Plus beard. Obvs.])

This blog post has inadvertently become every discussion about the Beatles my brother and I have ever had. Of which there have been infinite. If my brother was guest blogging he would then have a terrible opinion about his favorite album/song and then I would force him for the bajillionth time to listen to the b-side of Abbey Road (you cannot deny it. None of you. Don’t make me make you listen.) Brother would then tell me for 200th time that he can never really tell which Beatle is singing and he would have to be dead to me for a while.

There is a new multimedia experience I am trying to add to this whole blog situation. I made a terrible quality video of me singing. Mostly this is to give you insight to my all day/everyday. Yeah, I know it’s dumb to drive around with headphones, but I just can’t get it loud enough without. I cannot listen to a song I know without singing alone. Especially in the car. I am a car singer extraordinaire.

My favorite part of this video at the end is when I am talking to another driver who is making poor decisions. Lol at the constant turn signal noise. I crack myself up. Enjoy.

Three Dog Night - Eli's Coming

The a-typical gender roles and overall dynamic in my family is weird. Most families are weird. I consider mine the weirdest, but probably because I’m in it.

A little overview before the story.

My dad is more like my mom. My mom is very dude-like. My dad is the homemaker. Despite the fact that up until he retired a month or two ago and made 4 times what mom makes, he was still the housewife. He cooks, cleans, does laundry, etc. still finds time to build porches and paint the house, all that good stuff. Mom, still works whatever hours she wants (she owns her own business) is very misanthropic. Has no friends, doesn’t want any friends. Growing up in such a large family, mom would now rather spend the rest of her life alone and quiet. Dad was an only child and craves love and attention at all times.

Growing up mom worked Saturday mornings. I can remember times before I started going to school (pre-kindergarten) where mom would do things with us (movies, swimming, etc), but what I most remember about growing up is my Saturdays with dad. Throughout the 80s, my dad drove a little Toyota truck and every Saturday morning my brother and I would pile up in the truck and fight over who got stuck in the middle while dad ran errands.

In the house I spent the early 80s in off Lake Wheeler road, (the house my engineer dad and his buddies actually built,) dad was forever building and home-improving. One of the biggest projects I can remember is the stand alone garage and workshop he and a friend built over one summer. The majority of our Saturday errands were trips to lumberyards and home improvement stores. Back in these days there was about 2 different home improvement stores in Raleigh and neither were big chains. One I remember very clearly was off capital blvd and is now a u-store-it kinda place. The day would always lead us to one fast food establishment or the other, sitting on the tailgate of the truck eating lunch. certain places will always stick out to me; the Hardee’s off Walnut Street in Cary. Arby’s on Hillsborough Street. Char-grill on Hillsborough. Although I have probably eaten at these same crap shops 1000 times since, I still think of dad, Kyle and I and being little and the grey Toyota truck.

There are 2 consistencies about these Saturday morning errands. A) Fighting over who got stuck sitting in the middle and the consequential ‘punch-bug’ fights that would ensue and B) my dad’s cassettes. Dad was always a music/vinyl junky. I owe my entire musical obsession to him. I owe to those Saturdays the fact that I can harmonize with the Beatles. It was on these errands dad would teach us all about his music. Tell us stories about each song (sound familiar?) some of my aural memories are recollections of my fathers’ memories (Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit and Viet Nam flashbacks, for example.) These Saturdays are when I remember my brother and I fighting over who could name that tune in the shortest amount of time. Couldn’t have been older than 6 or 7, we moved from the Lake Wheeler house to Apex in 1985.

One particular errand I can remember was pitching granite rocks that dad found via a rogue pile of off Beryl Road near the arboretum. I’m sure he was driving along and saw this big pile of scrap granite and hatched a plot. He was forever stopping to pick stuff off the side of the road. Pocket knives, hard hats, paint buckets, forever having a use for them somewhere. So one Saturday we drove out to the rock pile and spent the day loading the truck and driving back to the Lake Wheeler house and filling in our old sand box (which ran the entire length and breadth of the back porch of this house) with these rocks. It took a few trips. I remember complaining a lot.

I can’t tell you whether this song ever played on that particular day or not. But it’s one of dad’s favorites. I can’t hear this song without hearing my dad singing along. There are a million songs like this, for some reason this one sticks out. Most Three Dog Night, Beatles, Steppenwolf, Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, etc… songs are the same way. It was hard to pick just one, but I chose this one. Ironically my best friend had a son 4 years ago and named him Eli. I have meant to tell her specifically why that name meant something to me so many times and it has somehow slipped my mind until now. Every time I hear his name I think about Saturday mornings with my dad and brother and that little grey truck.