"ten shades of grey" - terrorvision

"it's night again all the time - shadows are lurking but i can't find mine"



one of the times i came closest to losing respect for a friend was when fred claimed that in his opinion regular urban survivor was a better album than how to make friends and influence people. its not just because he was clearly wrong, but because that album holds a special place for me. even though i have heard it and played it many times in many situations it will always be the summer of 1995 to me. on holiday without my family i was finally - at not quite 15 - able to step away from the roles i had been cast in in my normal situations and start to become myself. making friends, flirting outrageously with girls (by my standards) and generally not being dismissed by people out of hand gave me a boost of self-worth that was severely lacking in my life around that time. this album was everywhere that summer, and its bouncier songs like oblivion and time of the signs set the soundtrack for a slight tempo shift in my life.

"my name is jonas" - weezer

"tell me what to do now this tank is dry, now this wheel is flat"


i literally cant remember the last time i listened to weezer, i dont mean caught their video on tv or heard them on the radio, which i'm sure has happened a few times, but actually sat down and listened to an album. its gotta be 10 years since pinkerton came out, so i reckon in the last 8 or 9 years it can only have happened a few times.


i remember when my school first got the internet. it would have been autumn of 1995. we had a teacher with some contacts and we were testing some kind of line that was pretty new at the time but i suspect is madly out of date by modern standards. everyone got an e-mail address and internet access, and like a typical internet newbie i threw myself into things. i signed up for pointless email lists (i got sent the weather in california 5 times a day, for example, and it took me forever to get off the thing that sent you sermons about star trek) and found many many ways to waste time online. i down loaded enough guitar tab to teach myself to play, i added my 2p to many discussion boards (including the early snon) and got hooked on the centre for the easily amused. im pretty certain it doesnt exist any more but at the time it was full of pointless things and links to more pointless things (oh to be able to find the enormous buttons of mild amusement again. it also had a board where you could sign up for an e-mail penpal.

i feel really guilty that i cant even remember the name of someone i corresponded with regularly for over a year, she deserves better than that for putting up with my angsty adolescent moaning for so long. if anyone reading this blog thinks im on some kind of self-absorbed downer they may find it hard to comprehend that im now a well-rounded individual having cast aside a lot of the stuff that made me such a twat in high school. in fairness, with hindsight at least 95% of everyone i knew in high school was a twat in some way or another, its an integral part of being that age isn't it.
a typical email from me at that time probably read
"hi ... blahblah ... no friends ... blahblah ... life is crap, maybe ill die ... blahblah ... some comment about music and/or pop culture designed to make me look quasi-cool in an isolated subcultural way ... blahblah ... me me memememe ... blahblah ... oh and how are you?"
and yet she still managed to be my friend (/pillar/pillow/therapist) for months. she even downloaded the complete tab to 2 weezer albums for me when they turned up the internet filter on the system to "re-he-he-ally safe" where any site that had a link to a site they had already blocked was blocked, even if that site was only blocked for linking to another site that was blocked for linking to a blocked site. maybe she saw something in me that was of worth, or maybe she was just scared to let me go in case i made a mess when i landed. either way, i owe her so much.
and i cant even remember her name