Soundtracked

Tell Me Something Good

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This week's theme: Guilty Pleasures

Ok you guys...I'm not in a happy mood right now. Thursday I had one of my really bad days, depression-wise. Woke up yesterday and was in a much better frame of mind...but I couldn't walk. Seriously. My lower back was on fire...I could barely make it across the room to the coffee pot. It loosened up some throughout the day, but by the time I got ready for bed last night it was ridiculously tight again. I could barely bend down enough to plug in my laptop. I have no idea how this happened...it's the weirdest thing. The last time my back hurt this bad it was from playing basketball all afternoon...like, ten years ago. And it's not like I've done anything strenuous in the last day and a half to have earned this kinda pain.

I woke up this morning...same thing. I'm walking like I've got a 2x4 shoved up my ass and 16 pieces of luggage under each arm. It's not a good look. At some point I'm gonna hafta run try and make it across the street to CVS for some kind of pain meds or back patches (I've always loved the heated back patches, because they work). Only, it's -1 degree Fahrenheit outside and icy as fuck.

To make matters worse (and there's always a worse), I woke up freezing because although my room is a little drafty I can't sleep with the heat on because it's radiator heat, which means it gets desert hot in here if it's left on for too long. So I either wake up in the middle of the night drowning in sweat, or I toss and turn in the early morning trying to friction up some damn heat (at least tossing and turning isn't shudderingly painful). And I had a dream about a girl I went to high school with who lost a sister in a drunk-driving accident...the deceased was a classmate of mine but we weren't close, and I had one line of a song about a car crash playing over and over in my semi-consciousness but I couldn't figure out what song it was from ("Crash my car every day the same way."  ). I thought maybe I'd use that today instead of the song I thought last night I might use, but then I was like, "No, I like Thursday too much to consider them a guilty pleasure at this point...I paid actual money to see them live." Thank your deities there's only one more day of this category after today, because my choices are runnin' slim.

So I'm scrolling through Facebook, alternating between how I'm gonna figure out the poem I wanna write for my "Give It 100!"  project later and debating on whether or not I really wanna use Vendetta Red's "Shatterday"   as my guilty pleasure for today (to the point where I pretty much had that story lined up in my head)...when I came across a link about Chaka Khan. Boom! Perfect. Ideal song/artist, because it's been a shitty few days and I love this song, and admittedly I'm not super into her or Rufus...but I will jam whenever I hear "Tell Me Something Good".

"Your problem is you ain't been loved like you should.
What I got to give will sho 'nuff do you good."
Lyrics.  

And I can almost hear Cinn 's head pop just a little, with how this is not a guilty pleasure, but it kinda is for me. I'm sure I've heard this song tons of times before, but it really didn't mean much to me until around 2000 or so. Storytime...

I'd recently moved out of my first apartment and into a place with my man DMFM. A really weird set-up...we had a giant kitchen, an average-sized living room, and two small bedrooms (one off each room) that didn't have doors. And since I was moving from a one-bedroom in an apartment complex with only a tiny cooking kitchen and this was his first time on his own, we didn't have a dinette set or anything (bachelors for sure). What we did have in the kitchen though was a desk with a computer...like, an elementary school kid's desk with the flip-up lid, and some old-ass desktop computer his boss gave him. So we hooked it up with one of those dial-up AOL CD-roms, and we'd screw around in chat rooms until all hours of the night while gettin' drunk off of Miller High Life (The Champagne Of Beers!). Good times.

So early one Saturday night, I'm chattin' up a lady who, it turns out, happens to live around the corner from us...to the point we're describing little landmarks only the natives would know. She brings up music and how she likes to see local bands, and I mention I have friends who play, and she tells me she's getting ready to see a band called C.O. Jones  ...I guess she knew the singer and this was a reunion show of sorts for them, because he had just gotten back in town while on break as the touring keyboardist for the Goo Goo Dolls  . She asked me if I wanted to come out, so I said "Yup" and just like that I had a date. The internet used to be amazing like that.

I don't remember much about the night, to be honest. I do know I was not really attracted to the girl, and I got pretty shitfaced. I know the band played "Tell Me Something Good"  , and I freakin' loved it. Then I remember leaving whatever bar we were at and going to one of my favorite spots, Mohawk Place  , maybe to see if anyone I knew was playing but more likely to get even more wasted. I know I had at least a few pints there, because every time I finished one I had this poor girl shove the empty glass into her giant purse so I could add to my collection of stolen pint glasses.

And I'm pretty sure she never talked to me again after she poured me out of her car that night.

Anyway, if this song ever comes on in public anywhere now, and I've had even the slightest sniff of alcohol (or not), I will start groovin' (Can I say that? Is it ok for a li'l white dude to do that?) and slitherin' and bouncin' along. Like this is my jaaaaaam!!   and I'm sexin' my hips on up all over the verses before I take the damn chorus to church. I mean it. Sunday best and all. Peace be with you, and also with you.

So yeah, I needed this today. Good news. Somethin' that'll make me want to attempt walking down a flight of stairs in frigid weather so I can get something for my shitty back, and then I can lounge around in pajama pants all day while I come up with an anti-Valentine's Day poem that doesn't suck for my "100"  collection. Surely more than a couple of you can come up with somethin'. Get on that.