Your mother does not work here

A friend and regular reader recently asked a pretty good question: what's the point in making a bed? As someone who makes his own bed everyday he's at his home, I have my reasons. But more along those lines, I think there's something that comes with the discipline you choose to keep after you've moved out of your parents' house and the discipline you let fall to the wayside.

In my case, I like to make my bed everyday because it looks nice and tidy during all the hours I'm not sleeping in it. Nobody has told me to make it, and since straightening everything and folding things back in takes an average of a whopping sixty seconds per day, the "chore" fits neatly into my daily routine. However, when I'm staying at my parents' house (aka, the house I spent almost twenty years living in), I fall back into the habit of never making the bed.

Something I think is imperative for people trying to find their way as an adult is to live without Mom and Dad. Just the mere notion of paying rent, fixing things, and cleaning up after yourself is a valuable lesson for those that have always counted on the parents to take care of everything.

But I won't lie: there was a point during my first few months of living without my parents where I realized I could do whatever I pleased. Luckily for me that didn't involve staying up all night, skipping class, or drinking excessively. Rather, it was choosing to not go to a home football game on a Saturday night. It was choosing to wake up on a Saturday morning when I wanted and doing whatever I wanted (which, like a lot of my life now, involved watching movies, playing video games, and surfing the Internet). Instead of thinking this was rebellion, I take the side of an astute observer I know: it was growing up.

I think it's important for parents to instill a sense of routine and work ethic just for the sake of getting little things done everyday. I don't judge friends or family who don't make their beds, but I definitely judge myself when I don't do it myself.

I never want to say my best days are behind me

During all the hours I spent at the Warped Tour, I enjoyed running into a couple of people I interviewed for POST. Coupled with my time at the 94.5 the Edge reunion show on Friday, I found the conversations to be a nice lesson in moving on. More specifically, having a nice, steady gig, but it's a gig that doesn't always last forever. Yet after that gig is over, you're able to find something as good or even better, or you're simply able to move on with your life.

In the case of the Warped Tour, I ran into someone who is a phenomenal bass player from a legendary band, but his current band has probably received more hate as being a redundant band in a sea of redundant bands. Another person I ran into used to play in a band that was loved in its day, and is still loved to this day, but this band never reached a very large audience. Anyway, he's been working as a sound man for a few years and still plays guitar here and there.

At no point during either conversation was there a sense of "My best days are behind me and my life sucks now." While I'm sure more fans would love to talk about their previous bands more than what they're up to now, I never got the idea that these guys were grieving for a time that has passed. Even though their heralded bands still get together from time to time to play one-off reunion shows, they aren't the touring machines they used to be.

I understand how doing a band itself can be a really short-term sort of thing. Most people don't know all the tough work and sacrifice that comes with doing a full-time band for years. The kind of routine is incredibly difficult to keep up with after so many trips on the road and in the studio. Sure, there are plenty of career musicians, but there are way more who don't do music for the long haul. And I think the same applies in the case of working in radio: there are plenty of more people that can be in for the long haul, yet I've come across plenty of people that are only in it for a few years. And some of those people are bitter.

I've heard plenty in my time of working in radio about how things were so much better before such and such. The industry is not full of people who have this bitter axe to grind, but there are definitely plenty of them that like to post stuff online. Still I remind myself that I know someone who lost her house in a fire and broke her neck in a helicopter accident, but she still works like a total pro and radiates positive energy every single day. Yet people who have had much smaller tragedies (like a sudden layoff or format change) use that as a stumbling block that never goes away. Luckily, I didn't meet anybody at the Edge reunion show that was grieving for a past time in their current station in life. What they did in the past was a ton of fun, but they've found something else to do that has its advantages and disadvantages.

I think about a sign I saw recently outside of a Presbyterian church, no less: "Challenges can make life bitter of better." I completely agree and sometimes, I really appreciate being around people that choose to go with the latter more than the former.

Warped Wrap-Up

Well, I was on my feet for nine hours, and here's my wrap-up of yesterday's Warped tour.

Vans Warped Tour
Superpages.com Center
July 5, 2009

Better Than: falling asleep on the beach and getting a
funny-looking tan.

The weather could have been way worse for Sunday's Warped Tour date. It could have rained all day. Or it could have been sunny and extremely hot.

Luckily, the weather fluctuated between cloudy, sunny, and overcast. In a lot of ways, that weather rundown sounds like the kinds of moods the entire day was for all things Warped.

Read the rest here.

Mind Warp

My preview of Sunday's Warped Tour date is now online.

Dissing the Warped Tour and its primary audience is about as moot as criticizing Nickelodeon for catering to a younger audience. Fifteen years in, the Warped Tour still has a reputation for being a fairly priced, all-you-can-digest buffet of bands. From Underoath to Dance Gavin Dance to Bad Religion, there's plenty to see and hear—if you can tolerate the heat.

Read the rest here.

The TV entertained itself

Now just a few weeks after the historic transfer from analog to digital TV, I have tried to check out my local channels on my home's TV only twice. Sadly, the ABC affiliate does not come in, and the other channels are hit and miss with reception. But when I come home everyday, I don't think about turning the TV on. Yet when I visit my parents or certain relatives, the TV is a must.

Part of my main gig involves having five television sets on the entire time. I'm on the Internet all the time as well, but only the Internet is something I want to be on when I get home. There's no desire to turn on the tube and watch when there are books to be read, magazines to be read, books to be written, and DVDs to be watched. And, of course, music to be heard.

For whatever reasons they are, I don't mind watching episodes of Arrested Development or Dinner For Five over and over again while I eat dinner. With the first four seasons of SNL and the entire Battlestar Galactica series coming my way in the next few weeks on DVD, in addition to watching Cheers on Netflix, I have plenty to watch for the rest of the year.

But when I visit family or friends, I don't have all those DVDs crowding up my view. The same with books. I like to visit with my family and friends, but after so many hours of that, there's a desire to do something else, like watch TV. Or in the case of having two-year-old nieces, they need something to watch to occupy them.

As much as I enjoy being around friends and family, there is a desire to head on back home and come back to the everyday habitat. I guess that's proof that I've successfully found my own home and a homelife that's enjoyable. That only took how many years?

Warped Two

Reading through Pete's article on DFW's suburban mall punk, I find myself preparing for a major generation gap at Sunday's Warped Tour date. Seeing myself, a thirty-year-old with an old soul but reluctance to adhere to certain adult responsibilities, being around a bunch of teenagers and college students eating up all sorts of music, multimedia, and extreme sports, will definitely be something I don't see everyday. And that's OK by me.

I remember seeing a major generation gap when my band opened for Tilly and the Wall a few years ago. None of us had heard of the band, but there was a line almost wrapped around the venue before the doors opened. We played to our biggest crowd, and many of them were teenagers or UNT students who had never heard of us before. After the show, our lead guitarist came up to me recalling times when he wondered why old guys were at punk shows. Now he was the old guy, and just didn't get what these young folks were about. Personally, I didn't understand why all these folks in thrift store clothing were doing choreographed dance moves to modern hip-hop playing on the PA speakers.

Accepting the fact that people older than me gave me room to like what I liked when I was a teenager, I choose to not dump all over teenager's tastes in modern music. Make no mistake, I'd rather jam out to Hot Water Music's No Division than Paramore's Riot!, but that's what I do on my own time. That's what I value about listening to music by myself. My tastes aren't threatened by mall punk, yet things can feel incredibly alienating when people seem all excited about the kind of clothes the members of Forever the Sickest Kids wear or how many records Hawthorne Heights sold in one week.

I know there are times when I can be the bitter old man, yet when I see somebody that's my age or older be even more bitter, it's amazing how I can wise up. I don't see a sense in tragedy that At the Drive-In turned out the way they did or how the Get Up Kids ended up second on a four-band bill with Dashboard Confessional headlining. That's just the way things happened, and no amount of lifetime bitterness can really change that. So I just accept the fact that teenagers will like what they like and instead of sneezing at it, try to get a sense why they like it.

Warped

This Sunday will mark only the second time I've been to the Warped Tour. I was asked if I planned on covering it for the Observer, and I figured what the hell. I figured this will be a worthwhile (and very large) show to cover, so I'm looking forward to it. Of course, I'm over-preparing for a long, hot day with all sorts of precautions. Sometimes I wonder if the Boy Scouts motto of "Be prepared" is more about overpreparing and overanalyzing for things that may or may not happen. I know that all too well.

I got lucky when I went to my first Warped Tour back in 1998. Since there was a threat of rain, the entire show was moved from the parking lot to inside the Astroarena. The Astroarena was built for conventions and not built for concerts, but that didn't stop Nirvana from coming through there on the In Utero tour. I never heard any complaints about sound or the sound system, but then again, you can miss a lot of over-ring and flutters with earplugs in. Keep in mind, that over-ring is what causes your ears to ring for days after the show if you didn't have earplugs in.

Anyway, because of apparently crappy sound system in the arena, NOFX decided to throw their entire payment for the day out into the crowd. As somebody who had spent an entire year on a few e-mail discussion lists reading debates about punk rock, making money off of playing punk rock, what it means to sell out, who has sold out and who hasn't sold out, none of those debates mattered when I saw this sea of teenagers and college students rush to grab a dollar bill or two.

There were many great sets I saw that day, including Bad Religion, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, 22 Jacks, Unwritten Law, and the Rev. Horton Heat. And I got to see them all in the safe and cool confines of the indoors.

But now, looking at Warped Tour in 2009, I understand I'm not the same pop-punk/hardcore fan that I was in 1998. I've been critical (and still am) with the idea of mall punk, mall emo, and mall hardcore, but that's simply the purist in me. Another side of me comes through when I think about how glad I was that there was (and still is) something like the Warped Tour.

Jaded hipsters who claim to value booty-shaking music as much as atmospheric, Beach Boys-like rock can sneeze all they want to at the bands on the Warped Tour. Yet there's something to be said about music that impacts you at a young age and you still value that music years later when you don't listen to it that much (or at all) anymore. I haven't heard any of the latest records from any of the bands playing this year's festival, but there are quite a few bands that I look forward to seeing (like Bad Religion, the Ataris, and Underoath). I still have a taste for this music, so I figured I'll go for it and hope to have a good time, even though it will very obvious I am not a part of the target audience.