If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear that it was New Year’s just about a year ago! I decided to dust off the ol’ website and wrap the year up with some keyboarding.

Not this kind:

 

But this kind:

 

Is it even still called keyboarding? I remember taking a keyboarding class in 1987 or 88 in summer school. I sometimes wonder how I ended up in that class. I guess I must have expressed interest in going, why else would I want to get up at 8:30AM on summer break to sit and learn how to type more efficiently? At least I’d get home just in time to watch Too Close For Comfort and The Love Boat which were on back-to-back on weekdays at 10:30. Prior to that I don’t think I’d laid my paws on a computer keyboard since 2nd or 3rd grade when we played Oregon Trail at Crestview Elementary. I remember putting the big square floppy disk into the drive and the teacher telling us that when we reached around the back of the computers to boot them up to be sure to have one finger on the bare metal to avoid risk of shock. I’d like to see something like that get approved for use in school classrooms now! The risk of shock was toadilly worth it to play Oregon Trail. As a young KISS fan, every time I booted up one of those computers I heard Ace Frehley’s “Shock Me” in the back of my head and wondered if this would be the time I’d finally get zapped. Thankfully it never happened.

*******

So yeah, there goes 2017! What a strange ride it was… on the morning of August 30 I pulled a 12′ moving truck up to our apartment in Brooklyn, and with the help of the amazing super packmaster and bassist extraordinaire Gregg Mitchell and a few Task Rabbits, our wee little 1br studio was emptied into it and off we went that afternoon. 24 hours later we were crossing the Minnesota border, drunk on sleep deprivation and thinking back to driving the moving truck across the MN border on our way to NYC in 2009. I remember thinking “When’s the next time we’ll be crossing the border coming IN to Minnesota?” Well, I found the answer! August 31 2017. I never ruled moving back to MN out, but never really thought it would actually happen and/or that it would be such an eye-opening, positive experience. Here’s a few moving-weekend pix – these are about all that exist:

 

Way too much shit (August 2009)

Lemmy tell ya, though: As stressful as it got at times, living in Brooklyn was as amazing as it was expensive! We made a lot of new family members out there (I’m looking at you, Gregg and Ethan) and had so many cool “Are we really here with these people?” experiences that made it 666% worth it. If you’re thinking of making yourself a fish out of water by moving to a new city (or even country), I urge you to do it! Sure, it turned me into a bit of a misanthropic grump those last couple of years, but if I had the keys to Doc’s DeLorean and enough plutonium to go back to 2009 and change anything, I wouldn’t. Well… maybe other than telling us to bring about 2/3 of what we brought in the moving truck. Our apartment was pretty small and we ended up making a few trips to Salvation Army with whatever we could live without. I’d probably also throw a huge stash of Surly in the moving truck as well.

On the flip side, moving back to Minneapolis has been as amazing as it is affordable. I keep telling people here “You have no idea!” It’s easy to take things like getting in a car and driving a few miles to the grocery store for granted. And windows. And sunlight. Air that smells like air, not bird poop and garbage (which I sometimes miss in a weird way). I know, because I took all of that and then some for granted the first time we lived in Minnesota! Even though it’s been 4 months, we’re still getting acclimated to this strange new wide open world and will be for quite some time. I still feel naked when I leave the apartment to go to the grocery store without my backpack on – there have been times in the past month where I’d go to the store with it on and get home only to realize that I never took it off to load it up with groceries. It’s also weird to go to the mall and not have that thing strapped to my back. If we have too much to carry, I can just go lock it up in the car. I wonder how much longer this phantom backpack sensation will persist.. it reminds me of how after I cut my long hair off, every time I put my shirt on I’d reach behind my head to pull my ponytail that wasn’t there anymore out from under the shirt.

Here’s some stuff off of the top of my head that I learned and/or observed between January 1-December 31 of 2017:

  • I still wish I liked drinking tea instead of coffee, and wine instead of beer. The struggle is real.
  • Cats can overcome their fear of vacuum cleaners! Sometimes it just takes 14 years. Last week when I was vacuuming, Frank was sitting on the davenport just watching me with an “Eh, f**k it. I’m staying here” look on his face, even when I got close to him. Same thing a few days ago when he was on the bed. He used to run and hide as soon as the thing was turned on. He can still hear a treat bag wrinkling from a mile away so I know he hasn’t gone deef.
  • I thoroughly enjoy having a job where I’m on the road a lot and not tethered to a desk or just one office.
  • I still stand by the fact (not opinion) that NY pizza is not the best in the world. That includes the terrible frozen pizza selection in grocery stores, and I’ll even throw the gourmet stuff like Di Fara and Grimaldi’s in there too. Enough with the coin slices of that grody clay-like weird brown sausage. Crumble that shit! And don’t be afraid to add a little flavor to it.
  • I wish that Yankee Candle Co. made a subway air-scented candle. I’m not talking about the aforementioned bird poop and garbage smell. There’s a certain mechanical subway aroma I’d catch a whiff of when walking over the ventilation grates on the sidewalks that I always enjoyed. My brother said that same smell lingered in the train stations in Austria.
  • In the “never thought it would happen” dept., I’m sick of Chipotle.
  • In 2017 I started enjoying playing guitar solos. My own, no less!
  • Surly Furious is still delish. I’ve had so much of it since moving back that as of right now, Furious and I are taking some time apart to figure ourselves out. 
  • 2017 became the year I could no longer stomach Starbucks… which worked out great, because I couldn’t really afford it anyway. I never truly liked it to begin with, but would stop in for a nitro cold press or iced mocha caffeine fix on occasion because Starbucks are everywhere. I think I read there’s over 350 of those fuckers in the NYC area! We even lived above one. Once that last price increase came along, my backpack became one thermos of cold press heavier.
  • If you’re moving to or within NYC, make sure that your floor isn’t a cockroachy shade of brown. When you see one of those bulletproof bastards scoot across your floor, a cockroach colored-floor starts messing with your mind, especially if you’ve had a few drinks.
  • Doing something creative every day is a life saver. I highly recommend it. I’m still cranking out punnies and love doing it, even when it’s the last thing I want to do!
  • On that note I was wondering if the move to MN would stifle my creativity. Nope! Getting settled with jobs and a vehicle sorta did, but now that’s all out of the way, it’s time to make some musics.
  • Rehearsing nearly every single week with Gregg and Ethan not only did wonders for my guitar playing, but it also seems to have destroyed my ability to enjoy playing at home in headphones. It’s time to get a rehearsal space!
  • If you plan on meeting your guitar hero multiple times, getting the whole autograph-the-arm/tattoo-it-in thing out of the way first really takes the pressure off future encounters.
  • Being back with family and old friends is AWESOME. No shit, Sherlock. But only seeing the fam once every year or two (if that) was not cool.
  • Leeann Chin’s peking chicken used to be one of my favorites. Now I think it’s kinda gross.
  • If you’re apartment searching, try to get a unit on the top floor and corner of the building. That’s 2 walls and a ceiling of guaranteed neighborless peace and quiet – and if you’re lucky like we were at our current place, sunlight all damn day.
  • I did some math and realized I’ve walked across the Manhattan Bridge at least 400 times, and it was never the same walk twice.
  • I still miss the Uptown Bar’s nachos and have yet to find nachoier nachos. Two Boots were great but they closed up shop, and none of the other locations make them.
  • Dram Shop on 9th St and 5th Ave in Brooklyn had some pretty damn nacho-ey nachos.
  • When you see a sign in NYC that says “VOTED BEST [insert food item here] IN NYC”, there’s a 99.999% chance it’s bullshit.
  • Case in point: Speaking of nachos, we had what were considered the BEST NACHOS IN BROOKLYN at a watering hole on 5th Ave near our apartment. I’ve had better nachos for 99 cents at rollerskating rinks in the 80s.
  • You sure can fit a lot of stuff into a small apartment.
  • Exercising on an elliptical machine after downing a couple of robust IPAs is not the greatest idea, both logistically and physically. That hasn’t stopped me from doing it more than once, though.
  • I had one cigarette in 2017 and it was disgusting.
  • Driving a girthy moving truck 55mph down a narrow 1 lane construction path on a highway at 2am when it’s raining is terrifying.
  • Garbage disposals are awesome. So are dishwashers and washing machines.
  • Moving trucks should all have CD players or at least an aux input. Ours had a radio. The radio likes a lot of music that I don’t.
  • I am not an Ed Sheeran fan.
  • Moving sucks.
  • I wish more people could see what I see at work every day.

Hold on a sec. That last bullet point is a good one… it’s time to

I’ve worked for non-profit shelters for almost 2 years now and have seen some pretty crazy eye-opening shit. I loved my job in NYC and by sheer coincidence and good timing I ended up at the same type of place here in MN. Both organizations provide everything from room and board, food, health care, and computers (which is where I enter the picture) to people who don’t have it so great: orphans, severely mentally handicapped people from children to seniors, alcoholics, drug addicts, battered women with nowhere else to go, and kids who were taken from their horseshit parents by the authorities. There’s so much negativity and complaining on Facebook (which is one of the many reasons I try to stay away from it) and in everyday life that a lot of the Complainy McComplainertons don’t seem to be aware of the bigger picture: Complain away as much as you want, but keep in mind that at least you can wipe your own arse (or so I hope) and don’t have to be reminded after every bite to chew your food before swallowing so that you don’t choke. If you want to get up and leave the house and get an ice cream cone or have a beer, you have the option to do it! If you don’t like what’s going on politically, at least you get to vote, and you have the option to go do more than that if you want. I’m sure many of the residents I’ve encountered these past couple of years would be more than happy to trade places. Instead of being trapped in their situations, I’m sure they’d be glad to complain about their iPhone not working the way it’s supposed to, congested traffic conditions, how cold it is outside, or how crappy and disappointing last night’s football game was.

That being said, does anyone know how to get autocorrect to work better on the iPhone? It’s the most annoying galldamn thing in the world to have to constantly correct its corrections.

I keed!

Have a happy 2018! Last but not least, here’s a quick look back at the year in punnies – approximately 355 of the days out of 2017 saw a new punny drawing. I wonder what kind of pun-ishment 2018 will bring?