Candles, Dean, George, and the Posse

Celena went out to a movie tonight, so I decided to spent the evening in semi-darkness. The kids are finally in bed, the house is quiet, and the living room is filled with candles of assorted shapes, sizes, and colors. All of them now are now flowing with a nice wax au jus layering, just begging me to do something evil with it.

So, while I've been playing Ogdor, keeper of the wax bath, I've been listening to some new albums that I purchased recently. One is a collection of Dean martin, another is George Thoroughgood, and the last is a collection of 80's/90's hip hop. Yes, quite a mix. I'm feeling strange in my tastes tonight.

It has been a singular evening: there are a few songs on the hip hop mix that remind me of high school for some reason. Tennessee by Arrested Development and Summertime by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. I remember listening to these in high school and finding them to be some of the only uplifting music I payed attention to. Even today, when I'm feeling despondent, spiritless, morose, and fed up (otherwise pronounced as "depressed"). Despite my self-imposed teen angst, this music brings me back to a simpler time in my life where all I had to worry about was school, food, and sleep. Shuffle forward almost a dozen years and I still use it as a calming draught.

Sometimes i wonder what happened to the other folks I knew in high school. I wasn't, what you'd consider, a "cool" kid. I was one of the smart ones. Yes, I've been known to blow a curve or two. I remember folks like Daniel Hiland, Jacob Hart, and Valerie (sadly, I forget her last name; I never bought yearbooks -- that whole teen angst thing again). I remember just sitting back in the storage closet of our senior physics class and bull shitting most of the time. I remember listening to Frampton Comes Alive back there. I remember taking the purity test back there with them and then getting my ass chewed out by the teacher when he found out what we were talking about.

I remember Mr. Gildemeister and Mr. Ray. They were my physics/astronomy/geology and chemistry teachers, respectively. Mr. G was one of my favorite role models in school. He knew his shit, he didn't have an ego about it, and was willing to teach you more if you were willing to learn. Somewhere in all this, I picked up an interest in Richard Feynman and his background in physics (and some other things completely unrelated to physics). I picked up his complete lecture series because I had high hopes of "learning more physics" and "preparing for college". It never really helped. Walking down that railway, I got stuck and lost interest in many things related to science. I still go back and page through the lectures when I'm feeling the urge to "self-medicate" with the club of learning.