Apologies all around for disappearing the latter half of the summer. Those of you who know me know how busy my life can get — and how lazy I typically am about writing. But a few thoughts from the past several weeks:
- OLD SCHOOL JAMS: My wife had an MRI done last week and they let her bring in a couple of CDs to listen to while they ran the machine. She grabbed a copy of a 2004 limited-print album I did, compiling 12 originals from previous projects. She said it was a comfort to hear my voice singing while she went through the test, and that made me puff up my chest a little and spend a bit more time than normal with her this weekend. To be honest, I’d really forgotten about the little disc and the songs. I tend to move on to the next thing pretty quickly, and what’s done is done and I fight myself every time I have to come back to something. But as we were driving around this weekend, I found myself listening to the CD, sharing it with our daughter and decided revisiting the past isn’t always a bad thing. The songwriting’s not the best and the music is very lo-fi, nearly demo quality. But for me it was a sign of things to come and it’s nice to see how much I’ve grown as a singer, a musician and a writer.
* You can download the entire record for as little as $5 from a site I set up over the weekend. (http://jamesdunning.bandcamp.com/) Let me know what you think. - FOOTBALL SEASON IS HERE: I’m not a big sports guy, but now that I’m in two fantasy football leagues, I find myself paying better attention to sports. I spent the better part of Saturday watching college games and it was refreshing. One of my favorite times of the day now is starting my day, eating breakfast with my daughter, watching ESPNS’s SportsCenter. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m a father now and I’m suddenly filled with this desire to make sure she’s properly introduced to sports or if it’s because I’m a guy and that’s what guys do (I’ve finally succumbed to all the beer and junk food commercials) or if, in this crazy, mixed up world, there’s a sense of normalcy and calm in watching a guy throw a no-hitter or seeing a striker rope a goal from 30 yards out or cheering when a free safety snags an interception and runs it down the field for a touchdown. This year alone, I’ve been to the Colonial PGA tournament, watched in person my Mariners lost to the Rangers and skipped work to catch USA narrowly win in World Cup pool play.
* Go Seahawks! - THE BOOB TUBE: “Sons of Anarchy” starts tonight and I’m stoked. If you haven’t seen this FX drama about a northern California motorcycle club, you need to check it out. I’m not really into bikes, but the music on the show is top-notch and the storylines are good, good, good. I wouldn’t let the kiddos watch it, but it’s a nice supplement now that “The Shield” is done. I’m trying to watch less television as a rule, but what I do watch, I’ve noticed, isn’t on the regular networks. I’ve been enjoying “Leverage,” “Dark Blue,” and old episodes of “Stargate: Atlantis” over the summer. Not Emmy-winners exactly, but better than brain-dead reality shows. (Except that “Wipeout” show; something about people getting knocked silly into a pool gets me every time.) Seems the like the better stuff has moved higher up the channel listing. Which sucks if you’re looking to get rid of expanded cable to save money. Thankfully, Netflix and the Internet have allowed me to catch up on shows I’ve missed.
* Dear Lord, please let me get to the end of my life without regretting that I didn’t watch more survivor shows on The Discovery Channel. - THE WRITE STUFF: Partly because of my job and partly because I made the time to do so, I’ve gotten back into writing. Like every other writer, I’ve got a couple projects going on at once and I’m hoping I’ve got something done by the end of the year. But I’ve been inspired by a few writers I’ve met or read this year and I high encourage you to make the time to read more. Brian from The Accidental Historian is a riot. Sure, he’s been writing about Lost Immigrants pretty much nonstop since last year, but the guy’s a really good storyteller and one of the smarter people I’ve met since I started the band. (I’m looking at you, Grayson County.) Like millions of other people, I’m slogging my way through Stieg Larsson‘s Millennium trilogy and am enjoying it (even if I did seen the Swedish film adaptation of the first book). I’m also re-reading Robert Traver’s Anatomy of a Murder and dreaming I’m an extra in a Perry Mason episode. One of these days I’ll get around to finishing my own whodunit?, but for now I’m letting others tell the tales.
* Suck it up and watch the Swedish versions of the Millennium films, subtitles and all. I’m sure the Hollywood version will be decent, but there’s something about listening to tales of murder in the Swedish tongue that makes it that more real.
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