The Ewings Came In The Mail

For whatever reason, the people at the American Association of Retired Persons seem to think that my wife’s uncle, who passed away about four years ago, lives at our house. I know this because they send us their magazine every month and it’s got his name on it, right there above the address. Sometimes I flip through to see what the old folks are getting themselves into these days. Mostly, it just ends up in the recycling.

But the cover of this latest issue caught my eye.

Yep, those are the people from Dallas smiling out at you from the page of this blog. Sue Ellen, J.R., and Bobby Ewing of the Southfork Ewings, they of the intrigues and the infidelities and the oil-soaked family drama. I guess they have real names, but who needs a real name when you're a Ewing? Apparently they’re doing a remake of the show, or to put it more accurately, a continuation that picks up decades after the old one left off, and it includes some of the original characters such as these three, as well as their children, now all grown up and being as shitty toward each other as their parents were back in the 70s and 80s. When I first heard about it, I was actually kind of surprised these actors were all still alive, but there they are. Hell, Sue Ellen’s even looking kinda good. Wuzzup, old lady?


My mom was the one who first told me about the new show, which is fitting since she was a huge fan of the original show back in the day. It was quite rare for her to miss an episode. In fact, one of her primary motivations for buying a VCR was so that she could record it anytime she wasn’t going to be able to catch it at airtime. She worked a lot, and when she wasn’t working, she was often running me to this or that activity, so this wasn’t uncommon. She pored over the instructions for how to set the timer to start and stop recording at the right time. If I was home, it was my job to make sure her shows found their way onto tape. I don’t remember if it was Dallas, Knots Landing, or Falcon Crest, but I once forgot to record one of her shows, and you can bet your ass I heard about it. Looking back, I can’t really blame her for getting mad. You work your ass off all day, you come home and all you want to do is kick back with your show, but your lazy kid couldn’t even be bothered to press a goddamn button? What the hell, young Holmes? Get with the program.

So that magazine up there’s been sitting on our coffee table for about the past week, and every time I walk past it, I get this weird twinge of nostalgia. At one point, I even caught myself devoting an entire thought to hoping the show does well. An entire thought! That caught me by surprise. I have absolutely no intention of watching the show, and the original was never really my thing - no talking cars, no Mr. T, no mystery-solving stuntmen - yet here I was hoping that it does well. Normally, I wouldn’t give this kind of thing a second thought, or if I did, I’d cheer for it to fail because I’m wired like that. But in this case, childhood memories overrode that and dosed me with the warm and fuzzies for a show I hardly ever actually sat down to watch.

But I guarantee I’ll be able to hum this theme song until the day I die.

Bingorilla

Groove Holmes

Those of you who are older than me and have already gotten used to those little "oh shit I'm not so young anymore" reminders that seem to pop up out of nowhere, you folks are free to skip this post. Or you can read it and roll your eyes or mumble/yell/slur/say something to the effect of "welcome to the party, jackass" in the general direction of your monitor. Me, I still get caught by surprise whenever one of those moments comes along, but hey, I'm a slow learner.

See the latest of these reminders came not too long ago when I was ripping our CD collection to the 'puter. As tedious as this task was, it was a lot of fun going through all of our music and rediscovering all the stuff I'd kinda forgotten about, remembering how much I liked all these albums, how some of them would stay in my CD player for days on end, particularly the ones I used to dork out to and play along with on guitar. Yes, I played the guitar along with albums. Yes, I sometimes got very into it. Yes, my first college roommate walked in on me doing it one time and I was almost as embarrassed as I would've been if he'd caught me doing the one-eyed chicken choke.

Ahem.

Anyway, one CD I ran across that did not involve any six-string abuse on my part was The Beastie Boys' "Check Your Head." This is the one that damn near everybody in my age bracket had (well, in addition to the two that came before it) because it had the single "So Whatcha Want." I remember being a teenager and buying this album on tape at some crappy music store in a mall outside of San Antonio. It was summer time and I was working as a camp counselor, and on the weekends we did what camp counselors do with their free time: get the hell out of nature and into some damn AC and proceed to act like complete social idiots because we've been out in the woods for days on end regressing into animals. I have no idea why I still have the memory of this album purchase, but hey look, there it is. "Check Your Head" has always been my favorite Beastie Boys album, hands down. It's the one where they seemed to figure out that they could do more than just party music....which of course, as a teenager, I didn't give a shit about. I was like, "Make with the rappenin' cuz that's what's happenin!" But over time I came to appreciate just how great a piece of work this album really is, in large part due to all the little funk jams they tossed in there, especially the one that bears my name.

So the "oh goodness me I'm an old freak" moment came when I realized that this album came out in 1992, thus making it fifteen fucking years old. Fifteen years. Damn. Maybe I'm just surprised because to my ears, it seems to have aged pretty well.