Category: da blues

Slacker

Lazybones

Laggard

Sluggard

Loafer

Shirker

So endeth the thesaurus list.

Today, I am a slacker (sluggard?).

Today, I join the great masses of the unemployed.

Ne’er do well.

Thankfully, my shirker ways will end in exactly one week when I begin my new job and a whole new adventure.

I spent nine and a half years toiling for my former employer, and it was with a heavy heart that I left on Friday.

But ultimately, though painful, it was the right decision.

Next Monday I start with a company that is consistently in the top ten “best places to work”. We’ll see in the coming months whether or not I agree with that assessment, eh?

But for today, I’m a layabout. And I like it. Maybe a little too much.

Sigh

Another one bites the dust.

After nearly 40 years, Rolling Stone magazine is whittling down its trademark size. It will now look like every other magazine on the stands.

Ugh.

When I was 15, I had a subscription to Rolling Stone (thanks to the kindness of my mom, thanks mom!). I read it cover to cover every month, drinking in the journalism, the hot, hot interviews and the hip quality of it all.

I stopped subscribing when they went from newspaper print style to glossy pages. It wasn’t the paper, it was the quality of the product. Rotten.

So to be fair I haven’t read Rolling Stone in a good long while. But now, this nail in the coffin.

The magazine that was so subversive, so out there, so of-the-now is, at its heart, just another corporate owned mass-produced media product.

*sigh*

We’ve come a long way since RS 1:

Photo source.

Wow, a lot to be sad about these days

In short order, we’ve lot a lot of great voices.

As noted yesterday, Jerry Reed passed.

Also over the long weekend, Don LaFontaine passed away at the age of 68. LaFontaine was that great deep voice you’d hear in most movie trailers, “In a world…”

He was also featured in a Geico ad recently, which always gave me a chuckle.

And now today’s ABQjournal reports that Harold Gans has died at the age of 85. Gans was the moaning, groaning voice of Zozobra for over forty years (retiring from the gig in ’94), missing his turn at the mike only once, due to a heart attack in ’82.

This year’s burning of Zozobra will honor him.

That’s a lot of feeling speechless in just a few days.

I’ll keep my keening about the fact that Zozobra is already right around the corner to myself. : whimper :

Aw damn.

Musician Jerry Reed died today at the all too young age of 71.

Ol’ Jerry was one of the first concerts I ever took in. I was with my mom, the venue was Tingley Coliseum. The event was the rodeo at the New Mexico State Fair. Yes, I know it’s Expo New Mexico now. I grew up there. I call it like it was. :)

I don’t remember how old I was….less than 10 I think? Yeah, it was firmly in the 70’s.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Jer. Through all the Smokey and the Bandit movies. Through all his ridiculous and funny songs.

He was a talented man.

He will be missed. At least by me.

He lives on in my memories.

Really? No, can’t be. But it is.

Labor Day. A nice three-day weekend. A day off that signifies the end of summer.

WHY GOD WHY!?!?!?!?!?

I know I can’t regulate the passage of time, (cuz if I could I’d have a lot fewer birthdays I’ll tell you that much…) but COME ON! How did the summer slip away so fast?

Here we are again. September.

Heck, the frappin’ New Mexico State Fair (Oh, excuse me, Expo New Mexico) is just around the corner…like…starting on Friday.

The days are noticeably shortening.

Before you know it, Halloween will arrive with the chill it brings in the evening breeze. (the stores already have Halloween candy on the shelves!)

Pretty soon it will be five freaking thirty in the evening and pitch black outside…while I toil away at work.

Then the time changes.

Gah!

The Good Man spent some time last night explaining to me, again, how September and October are the *best* months in the Bay Area and I should be happy for Indian Summer. I am not.

I need sunlight! I’m a wilting flower in the hazy, cloudy skies!

(she says, whimperingly, while it’s planned to be 90 degrees here today…)

*sigh*

Seasons change. People change.

Basically, if I could go back to the week of my honeymoon in the heart of summer, sitting under an umbrella by the beach, happy hour at sunset…THAT would be great.

Instead I stare mournfully out my window…at work.

Maybe this is less about the seasons on the calendar and more about the seasons of my life, eh?