4 min read

Driving in the Snow

classy like that
photo: crowded arena, stage, large monitors with swimmy gold-hued graphics of pagodas & such
Place Bell, Laval, QC (proof of concert attendance)

Saw a post from some guy complaining that no one writes protest songs anymore. I don’t enjoy online bickering so I refrained from calling him a narrow minded fool. I'm classy like that.

Generalizations are generally a sign of a lazy mind. I don’t know where that guy gets his music but there’s no shortage of revolutionary sentiment being expressed in virtually every genre and medium and moreover I question the credentials of a self-styled cultural critic who’s apparently never heard of rap.

If that guy was one of my students from back when I had students I would press him to define his terms, then to challenge his assumptions, and finally to let his findings inform his thesis rather than writing to support his prejudice. I know that way of doing things is out of fashion. All the more reason.

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In January 2017 I drove facefirst into a blizzard that covered the northwest quadrant of the U.S. I saw the weather reports and didn’t care. That I was in a subcompact (Fiat 500) ill equipped for anything beyond jamming it into tight city parking spots and getting some sweet pickup on a straightaway in Sport mode was not also not among my concerns. My mission was to get to Oregon, like Lewis and/or Clark, or one of those doomed bastards in that old computer game from the '80s. My second goal was to avoid dysentery.

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