Silver Smoothie

Once a week, I like to get a gigantic smoothie. Vary up the old nutriment. For years, I had this one favourite spot in the Chinese sector, which might be relevant in a moment or two.

There was this other lovely smoothie place in the mall across from my house, and I used to think that it’d be extravagantly convenient if my smoothie place could have such a location.

Then the pandemic struck, and my old smoothie place, presumably at least in part because of its locale, was among the first to fall. From there, I decided this would be an opportune time to try out the offerings of that place by my house. And hey. It was even better.

Score another silver lining in the surprisingly argent cloud that is the pandemic.

Best cloud?

Nimbus!

Unsolicited

On Tuesday afternoon, I get this message on Facebook from someone I don’t really recognize. But she’s real. I think she came to one of my shows in the past or something? She wants to know when my next performance is, and then she says she’s looking to join a band. I say our roster’s full at the moment, but since our drummer’s next few weeks are quite busy, it’d be nice to have a spare drummer to sit in on the occasional rehearsal in that time. She’s excited, and we discuss details. Of course, I ask her if she’s been taking necessary pandemic precautions, and she assures me she has.

Later in the evening, she starts sending me random but harmless messages. I assume she’s bored and possibly drunk, but that’s fine.

Then I wake up early on the following morning to find this.

And that’s what I get for humouring unsolicited requests to jam.

Bonus Question!

Best jam!

Probably strawberry.

There’s a Frood Who Knows Where His Mask Is

You remember that style of kids’ PSAs that’d say things like “It’s cool to follow the rules” or “It’s hip to be safe”? And thus made themselves an easy target for facile middle school mockery? 2020 seems to be the year that’s determined to bear that out.

This is when even the crustiest punks are imploring people to practice social distancing and obey mask mandates.

“Yeah, you know that marathon month of hot box art show concerts we were planning to have in my unventilated 6-by-8 basement? PWYC, BYOB, dogs get in free? Yeah, um, I’m just going to do it by myself this summer. See you again when things have cooled down a bit though, yeah?”

And you see it, don’t you? You see two strangers walk through a parking lot, and the one in the mask is the one you’d want to hang with. He’s the one who knows what’s up. Remember when smoking stopped automatically making people look more attractive and ceased to be unequivocally cool? Now it’s just equivocally cool? You still might see the occasional person who looks good with a cigarette in hand, but they’d probably look about the same without it. 

This feels like the step beyond that. Tacit visible agreement with the statements of health authorities is the new hotness in the year of the new cold.

Bonus Question!

Best mask?

Jim Carrey.

COVID: The Movie!

This whole pandemic situation is feeling like an interesting movie that’s just too long for my liking. I want to see what happens, but I also really want to get out of here soon.

Things are going to happen after this! The world will be different! How? In what way? How will those differences feel? To different people? In different areas? Handshakes might be gone, but a lot of places never did that anyway. And which changes will last? Which ones will go the way of “Freedom Fries”?

There’s a lot to be curious about, and there’s also a lot of normal stuff to get back to besides.

But it already feels too long, and the world might run out of popcorn.

Bonus Question!

Best popcorn flavour?

Butter and salt, baby.

That Other Thing You Did

Hearing about the coronavirus death of Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger was weird for me.

The day began for me by listening to a podcast from earlier in the week. That episode happened to mention that he’d just been confirmed to be sick with the virus. Within a few hours of listening to that, I heard elsewhere that the disease had just claimed him. Not a lot of lead time for me.

Anyway, I learned that he was actually the dude who wrote the title song for “That Thing You Do!”, which was the one hit the fictional band in the movie was known for. That movie, starring fellow COVID sufferer Tom Hanks, was made in the 90s, the decade before Adam’s own band became, in the minds of many, a one-hit wonder with “Stacy’s Mom”. Personally, I preferred “1985”, but that’s basically where my knowledge of them ends.

Although they also did the music for and camoed in that MTV cartoon about an intern at MTV that was written by an MTV intern with the same name. I think his name was Greg? It was definitely a part of the title.

Bonus Question!

Best one-hit wonder?

I legitimately love Smash Mouth even beyond “All Star”. I think they qualify, though some might say “Walking on the Sun” was big enough to disqualify them. Anyway, that still seems like a fair answer.