Do Crime!

Author: BigJim

  • We Ain’t Got No Place to Go…

    So let’s go to the punk rock show.

    The line by MxPx (who, within the last 2 years I found out were a Christian band), really summed up my youth.

    I was a pimple-faced, awkward, suburban wannabe punk rocker. My friends and I weren’t really into sports, I had tried and didn’t like drama club.

    We were fat, unathletic, weird kids, who found our solace in punk music, and all of the offshoots – emo, hardcore, indie, and all of the subgenres and crossovers of each.

    I’ve been doing a deep dive into some of the music of my youth, as I’m moving my old MP3 collection from old laptops onto an SD card, because I found out my current vehicle has an SD slot, and can play music from it, as I try to de-digitize my personal life, and take control of my attention span.

    When looking through, and listening through my music collection, I’m realizing how lucky my friends and I were. Sure, we’re young enough that we missed the foundations of the music we love, being born in 88 and 89, just in time for Black Flag to break up.

    But, we were the dawn of the internet kids. We were lucky enough that we could find underground music through old blogs, digitized zines, and just browsing someone’s shared music files on a p2p sharing network.

    We also had the luxury of being, what I think, is the last generation of small-cap venues, where you could pay cash at the door, and make a whole new group of friends.

    We had the firehall, vfw halls, and lions club shows that were where our heroes performed to create the music we love. We’d rent out YMCA gymnasiums, soccer domes, and ink hockey rinks and book our own shows. $5-$10 at the door. No ticketmaster, no processing fees. The may DC taught us to do it.

    I think the generations that came after us, really are missing something. They have too many options now. They can live an entire world in their bedrooms, there’s summer camps, and after school programs, and involved parents. A plethora of structured and well meaning fun.

    And I’m not knocking that, completely. They have their spaces, like we had ours. But I’m sad that they don’t have the unsupervised, unstructured, unconnected lives that my friends and I did.

    There’s something special in the spontaneous. In the not knowing, and not connected.

    That’s all.

    Stay positive, go fast, do crime, get hurt.

  • Go Fast, Get Hurt

    The above has become part of our family motto. The whole thing? Go Fast. Do Crime. Get Hurt.

    Do Crime, and Go Fast, Get Hurt, were both two things I said on different occasions to my wife. The “Do Crime?” we were planting seeds for food plants in an abandoned field as a condemned school. Go Fast, Get Hurt, that was said recently to her at her first Crossfit competition.

    I think it sums up my view of the world pretty well. Do things that help people, even if it isn’t legal, and if you’re doing something, it’s worth getting hurt doing it, if it’s not, then it’s not worth doing.

    That said, I’m burned out. Mentally hurt I suppose. I need to slow down on all of the things going on in my life. I don’t feel like I’m catching up, in fact, I feel like I’m slowly getting sucked down deeper. Swimming in a riptide I suppose.

    I’ll get through it though.

  • We were the one thing in the galaxy God didn’t have his eyes on

    Have you ever felt nostalgic for a moment that didn’t happen? Or picture something in your head that you wished was a real memory, and not your imagination?

    I’m listening to “All Hail West Texas” today, by the Mountain Goats, and the song “Jenny” has me feeling nostalgic for a moment that I never experienced.

    I just have a vision of driving across the El Paso desert at sunrise on a motorcycle. One of those old school ones that have a side car.

    That’s the image in conjures, and the feeling of freedom, and the crushing vastness of the desert bathed in a warm orange glow.

  • I poked in all my quarters, Looking for the perfect swan song to walk out on

    Lately, I’ve been thinking about starting my own business. I like the idea of working for myself, and lately the idea of a carwash has been popping into my head, and with that, my nostalgia for an era that I caught the tail end of: House Quarters.

    These were the often, red-painted quarters you’d occasionally find in your change. A relic of a time gone by.

    Back when things still ran on physical currency, and people went out and about into the world, a lot of vending machines, pool tables, car washes, and other businesses ran on change. In the case of vending machines or pool tables, these were often leased from a parent company, while people owned car washes.

    The house quarter was painted red, so that if a machine needed to be primed for a game of pool, money for a vending machine that ate your quarter, or a carwash bay that needed to be hosed down, the owner would know to exclude the red quarters from their accounting.

    At least, that’s how I recall it. Here’s some pictures. They came via the link below, who took them from captain-unusual-youtube.

    1965 RED QUARTER
    1965 RED QUARTER

    https://99wfmk.com/red-quarter-mystery

  • We are plain, quiet folk and have no use for adventures.

    I’ve been doing a bit of reading the last few days, about stoicism, Thoreau, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien.

    A lot of the essay’s focus on stoicism, of course, as well as the notion of the “hedonistic treadmill,” and the concept of travel.

    I think about the concept of traveling a lot. It seems to be the buzzword, “hobby” of this generation. The ideal that you’re not fully living your life, if you aren’t going somewhere new, often.

    I have mixed feelings on travel, and I say this as someone who has been to 48 states, and 6 countries, and has lived in 3 different states. While the idea of a getaway is nice, I feel like so many people are getting wrapped up in this belief that as their world crumbles around them, getting away can refresh their mind and soul. But, the old saying “wherever you go, there you are” seems to hold true.

    Traveling doesn’t make you better, or fix your problems. It just let’s you step away for a moment, let’s those issues build up, because you stepped away, and didn’t resolve them.

    Face your problems, don’t travel thinking it’ll get better. Your messy home is still there, your love of self-induced drama, the bills you can’t pay because you live your life on credit card financing.