• There isn’t much good in popular music these days. I can sit and watch MTV, MTV2, VH1, Fuse, Saturday Night Live, and other music channels/shows and nothing grabs me in the boo-boo like Nirvana, Soundgarden, vintage Van Halen (before Sammy Hagar and whoever else Eddie has dragged in front of the mike), old Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sheryl Crow, BB King, Stevie Ray Vaughn, John Lee Hooker, Johnny Cash did when I first heard them.

Hey, don’t get me wrong. I’m not an old fuddy-duddy here, but haven’t you noticed that the only news Brittany Spears made in the past 2 years was when she kissed Madonna? And if I’m supposed to take Christina Agulera seriously, then why is she only wearing a slip in her videos and her breasts are sponsored by the Goodyear blimp? If I want to hear someone try to break a glass with their voice (ala Mariah Carey), the Seattle Metropolitan Opera is in season and tickets are on sale now. Rock me, Amadeus.

Do you remember the last time everything in popular music sounded the same? How one band looked like every other one, sounded like the next one and you couldn’t differentiate two bands by their music unless a video was on? Yeah, so do I. Do you know what happened next?

One word — Nirvana.

• I finally went to the doctor to get a checkup. Yeah, I’m a little overweight. I need to cut down on the fats and exercise more. Sure, I know that. Oh, I need to cut down on my beer intake, he told me. I told him that beer was the only thing keeping me from the Atkins diet. He told me that beer was the only thing keeping me from any diet. I like him. I’m going to keep him for a while. But I’m not giving up my Guinness shakes (Guinness + vanilla ice cream = yummy!) Don’t groan and say that’s gross. Try it. It isn’t as bad as you think it is...

• Did you know that some drug addicts believe that they’re the only normal people in society? Chew on that one for a while.

• I sat in a press box at a state football game this weekend with a coach who was telling everyone who would listen that he’d been on the Atkins diet for six months and lost a ton of weight. I asked him if the weight came off because of all of the yapping he was doing talking about the Atkins diet? He proceeded to shut up. I now have five new best friends here.

• Is it possible to tell a new mother that they baby is really frickin’ ugly? Well, I found out recently that there isn’t a way to do it without going to the doctor a few days later for a checkup. My voice is returning to normal gradually.

• I recently has my 32nd birthday. (Yes, thank you.) My grandfather once told me that birthdays don’t matter after a while, until you get to the age where you know you’re not going to have them for much longer. Of course, he told me this when I was 8 and I’ve been scared of my birthdays since. OK, I’m joking here. That’s too cruel. My grandfather was great. What he said is the truth, though.

But the bad thing is is that when I have a birthday, I downplay those babies like they were nothing special. Why? Because every day I wake up and am glad I just did that — wake up. Birthdays are just another day on the calendar, except that you know that that’s the day you first woke up.

On my birthday, I was putting some boxes away and I found an old article I wrote when I worked in Calistoga as a sports writer/photographer/paginator/wine taster. I also worked the police/fire beat and a two-car accident occurred at a bad intersection just north of town. A motorhome with an elderly couple and their granddaughter went out in front of a tire truck and the collision split the motorhome in half. The 10-year-old girl was thrown 75 feet from the collision and the grandfather who was driving was still strapped into his seat, which was run over by the tire truck. The grandmother was in the other part of the motorhome and survived with just a broken wrist and cuts and bruises.

One of the paramedics who arrived at the scene — Calistoga has a volunteer fire/medical department full of men and women you’d want as a neighbor, spouse, sibling, child — started working CPR on the grandfather. His hands were going through the grandfather’s chest. Two others went to work on the little girl, who was barely alive. I got there five minutes after the accident on one of the trucks and began writing down what I saw and snapping pictures.

They had to snake a tube down the girl’s throat to get oxygen to her lungs, but all I heard was the gurgling of blood in the tube. She was bleeding profusely and the two were frantic. Needless to say the grandfather and the little girl didn’t make it.

And I went numb.

Later that summer, I found a place where you could tandem jump out of planes — a parachuter is strapped to your back and you jump out of the plane, getting the experience of parachuting without the training. I did it twice. Why? Because my system needed a restart. The shock of what I was witnessing and writing down for posterity was just a little too much for me to handle. My life changed. I didn’t take too many things seriously anymore, especially my career.

Slowly, the numbness went away. The tandem jumping is one of my life highlights, because it was an experience I knew I’d never experience again and it was great. It was the best balancer to what was the worst experience in my life and career — seeing two people die in front of my eyes.

That’s something that stays with you. So, when I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is thank God I woke up. And when the times comes for the grim reaper to tap me on the shoulder, he’ll have one helluva fight on his hands. I’ve seen death. I don’t want any part of it, especially my own.

• Sorry for the heavy part of this. It has been one weird weekend. Over the past few weeks, I’ve driven from Hoquiam to Camus to Hoquiam to Bellingham to Hoquiam to Vancouver (near Portland) and back again. That’s a lot of driving. And a lot of time to think. And lot of bad music to listen to on the radio. And a lot of bad sports talk radio. And multiple casino ads on billboards.

This last trip was the weirdest — remains of a large-scale train derailment on I-5 near Kalama, a 5-year-old flipped my off, snow flurries with the sun shining, finding a parking spot near Kiggins Bowl in Vancouver after waiting for 20 minutes for a high school cheerleader to say good bye to her boyfriend for a few hours, an extra-point kick hit both uprights and was no good, a football official thought I was his long-lost son who was nothing more than a “no good SOB,” the drive-thru girl at McDonalds told me that she and her friends didn’t like the way I wrote the story on their high school football team’s 66-0 state playoff loss last weekend while I was ordering a quarter-pounder with cheese and the coup de gras — I lost one of my windshield wipers on I-5 when a semitruck deflected a huge rock onto my windshield, but the wiper got in the way and snapped off.

And that was just today (Saturday).

Have a good weekend. Go to church if you must. Watch football if you need to. Just wake up, eh?
2003 B&B Artists