This, the Twitter thread below, is an extremely true story. I took a nap this evening and have basically gotten back to the point of feeling like normal again. Can’t imagine how she feels, but she’s got the medication! And she can take naps if she feels like it.
I would like to note that while I do appreciate the effort, @kennysmith has literally not had a full, unbroken night’s sleep since I crashed. He’s gotten up to help me, or get meds from me.
I didn’t want him to stay awake any longer than he already had. https://t.co/ZYVog38K8v
— Lauren Smith (@LaurnSmith) October 4, 2022
I’d say she’s lucky, but I’ve seen the X-rays. I know exactly how lucky she is.
Spent most of yesterday at the office telling people about it, I think. Word gets around. Maybe in a day or two I’ll be back up to full speed, and feeling like it, too!
Let’s wrap up the Poplars Building talk. You’ll remember it was a hotel, and then dorms, and finally some administrative space. The whole building is gone now. They torn down the first half during late August and September. They took the other half last week. But the remnants are still there.
Eventually this will become a green space. I take that to mean they don’t know, yet, what they want to go in that space, but some plan will come along one day.
We should catch up on the Re-Listening Project. If that sounds official, it isn’t. I am working through all of my old CDs in the car. Easy content and, sometimes, good music. These aren’t reviews, mostly just the memories that mark the time.
This is strictly chronological, which is to say the order in which I bought all of these things. My discs cross genres and periods in a haphazard way and there’s no large theme. It is, a whimsy as music should be.
“Deluxe” was Better Than Ezra’s major label debut, and I bought this first as a cassette. “Good,” which they still do on stage as “The one you remember” was released in February of 1995, and I bought it sometime around there. Obviously I thought enough about it to purchase it a second time, as a CD.
I remember playing the tape version almost continuously on a three-hour solo road trip to see a friend.
First of all, no one remembers that Salma Hayek was in the video for the third single off this record.
Her career, in American media anyway, was just about to take off. This was sublimely timed casting that wouldn’t have been possible even a few months later.
Secondly, I have this weird flash of a memory of listening to this record in an Arby’s drive thru. Maybe that was the beginning of that road trip.
It’s a deep cut, but Summerhouse still holds up.
This, along with Rosealia, was one of my favorite songs of the record.
A few years later I was shooting pool in a restaurant — that no longer exists — when a friend came out of the closet to me and the guy playing his guitar in the corner was covering that song. I was the first person she told, she said. She figured I was from the big city, and that I’d understand. But I knew already. And whole, larger story, is an incredibly sharp memory.
Seven-ball-with-a-weird-pant-scuff-in-the-right-side-pocket sharp.
This was the song for part of that fall, and parts of many subsequent autumns.
Better Than Ezra has seven more studio albums. At least the next five get better and better. They’ll all appear in this list, eventually.
