Flotsam that should have been jetsam

Tasks both professional and personal are getting in the way of coming up with something of any interest or substance today (which I say as though I ever manage to come up with something of interest or substance, let alone both at the same time). But my goal of challenging myself to write something every day no matter what is still intact, so here are some things on my mind that, on a more creative day, would be rejected, but they'll just have to suffice today:

Issue #1: Just say no to fun
I'm a good solid week late to the "Randy Moss smokes jazz cigarettes" semi-controversy, but I just can't get over that he cautioned kids off of smoking pot, but then not only admitted to it, but used the term "have fun" as a euphemism for smoking pot, as in, "I've had fun in the past, and I might have fun every now and then." Yeah, that's real discouraging. It's like that classic Motley Crue Behind The Music, where they spend a full hour talking about all the crazy, fun times they had, and then say that no one should do the same thing, and that they're lucky to be alive. The good news of the Randy Moss story is that the vast majority of the people covering or reading the story don't seem to care at all, a sign that smoking pot is gaining more acceptance as the no-big-deal that it is.

Issue #2: The name game
I was excited to see a few details of the new Belle and Sebastian album, The Goalkeeper's Revenge, on Pitchfork today. It's comforting that they're keeping with their longstanding tradition of giving their albums crap titles, but reading over some of the song titles (“Song for Sunshine,” “Sukie in the Graveyard,” “Another Sunny Day,” “Act of the Apostle Part I”, “Funny Little Frog”) reminded me that any time I first see the song titles of a favorite band's new album, I immediately get pessimistic, as though these could only be the titles of rotten songs. It's just so hard to imagine myself putting "Sukie in the Graveyard" up there with "Your Cover's Blown" or "Sleep The Clock Around". It's a lesson in patience and book-cover-judging, I suppose.

Issue #3: All these people
For some reason, I just found myself thinking of my mother's old habit of turning freakish, isolated incidents into examples of common human behavior. These examples would almost always start with "It's like these people..." One of her favorites was, when needed a tale of stupidity and cruelty, she would say, "It's like these people who will pull their kids out of school to go see a car accident." I accepted this for years, feeling superior to these scores of people who were sick enough to gladly sacrifice some of their kids' education for the opportunity to see a mangled, bloody car wreck. It wasn't until my teenage years that it occured to me that, at best, this must have been something that happened once in some back woods town in the 1920's, when it was like the first car accident EVER. But in my mother's head, this act was commonplace, and something to consider and then feel shame for the sorry state of the human race.

Back to the grind. Huh. Work. When are they going to make it illegal?