Trevor Seigler's Day Off

Cue Ferris Bueller theme...

That's right, bitches, I'm taking a day off from my place of employment (name withheld because I remember what happened the last time I wrote about work online and, well, that doesn't merit a repeat performance, does it?). Why? Because I can.

The urge to take a day off during the work week has been building for a few weeks now, simply because (like laying out of school one day during your teen years) there are just so many things that you can do on a weekday other than be inside (albeit being paid to be inside, when you're talking employment). Without (again) revealing anything about where I work (though it is on my Facebook profile...so yeah), I can say that this time of year is really the optimal time to take a vacation day or two (though of course, the weather outside suggests usually that it's actually the worst time to take a vacation day. I mean, who wants to swim on the beach in February? Other than old people, and Jackie Mason. I have no idea if Mr. Mason does or not, I'm just glad to be free for a day and giddy and over-typing like a madman!). It's safe to say that I am not the only person who has taken advantage of said lean-time availability of days off, though I have no pressing concern that demands my presence. I simply wanted a day off.

With pay, of course.

Ideally, this day would be devoted to doing a lot of the things that I do on weekends: riding around and wasting gas because I need to get out of the house once in a while. Alas, my funds are low at this point in the week (bills, bills, and more bills) and while I'm waiting for my tax refund ship to come in, I'm trying to be better about my spending habits (such as "not having them"). So this is strictly a cheap-ass affair today, nothing that I can justify spending more than ten bucks on (this includes lunch. I hope for a home-cooked dinner as a favorite aunt of mine is back in town for the week, but such things are not preordained).

So why the day off, with low funds and no real "legit" reason? Because, barring holidays where I wasn't allowed to work (because we weren't open) I really haven't had a day off during the week since I went to New Orleans in August, and I felt like just one day out of the week would suffice to take me out of the cocoon that is everyday working week experience. I caught Ferris Bueller's Day Off on Comedy Central a few weeks back and (other than marveling at the damage age and marriage to Sarah Jessica Parker has done to Matthew Broderick over the years) I felt like dammit, I also deserve the chance to drive around Chicago on a bright summer day with Mia Sara and Alan Ruck. Or some reasonable facsimile thereof.

Because like the man says, sometimes you gotta take time to appreciate the things around you.

I just hope Ed Rooney is nowhere around, trying to buzzkill me.

Notorious B.I.G., "Big Poppa"

It's Valentine's Day today, and starting since about the time I walked from my car to work this morning, "Big Poppa" has been on-and-off stuck in my head today. I'm not sure why that is.

When Notorious BIG died in 1997, I can't say that I was a fan. It wasn't that I was actively against him; I just didn't really have any feelings towards him or his music. Much in the same way with Tupac Shakur (who preceded Biggie in death by about six months and is inexorably linked to him because of the identical ways they left this planet), I was shocked by the murder but not outwardly affected. I knew of him, of course, but it would take Puff Daddy (as he was known back then) to make Biggie's legacy apparent to me...by sampling the Police and putting out his own requiem for a friend.

"Big Poppa" really didn't come into my life until I caught a basic-cable screening of the Keanu Reeves vehicle Hard Ball, from 2001. You may be familiar with Reeves' constant ability to get work in big pictures even though he has the charisma of a wet piece of cardboard, but he's surprisingly good when you lower your expectations, and Hard Ball worked for me. I could believe that he was a white gambler who, in order to pay off some very bad men, took a job as coach for an inner-city baseball team of youngsters and learn something about himself in the process. Also, it was a slow afternoon, so I gave it a shot. All in all, I'd recommend it.

The pitcher for the team, a young kid with a fastball, only has confidence when he's got his headphones on and blasting Biggie's iconic song, the one he's probably most known for amongst non-rap fans. At first, I wondered about a kid that age listening to a profanity-laced track like "Big Poppa," but then I remembered that he lives in the projects of Chicago, where profanity is the least of his worries. I grew up in the rural area where Deliverance was filmed, so I can't speak to inner-city problems that I've never experienced (though I will say you don't want to be roaming the streets of Walhalla after seven...because everything but the gas stations is closed). As it turns out, gang violence inevitably spills over onto the team, and in a way that, as a casual viewer, had me close to weeping like a baby. Spoiler alert: the most adorable of the young teammates meets a tragic end.

So I went back to "Big Poppa," eventually getting it off iTunes, and it's something that I respond to far more than I'd have thought when it first came out. I can kinda see now, considering Biggie's personal history as a drug dealer who wanted to escape the very violence he chronicled and perhaps contributed to, that this "party anthem" is a desire for a life that is more than what he's known, and that the "grams I had to measure" represented the only way out for a long time. Guess what, kids? Not a lot of opportunities for inner-city youth that don't involve selling drugs or acting hard whenever someone from another neighborhood encroaches on your territory. Or so I've learned from rap songs and movies about the inner-city; I spent two days in New York in 1997, three in New Orleans last year, and I've been to Washington, DC twice during the Clinton adminstration. My experience sans art about the inner city is limited.

But the point I'd like to make (and I had one when I started, at least) is that, in the song, Biggie is trying to do something we'd all like to do this Valentine's day: get it on with a lovely lady. In that sense, there's nothing original there (personally, I leave it to the masters when I want "get it on" music: Marvin Gaye and Al Green). But there's a swagger that, while inherited from soul and the machismo of pre-feminism rock music, is made all Biggie's own. He's a smooth operator, saying all the things that the lady wants to hear, but he's also up-front that basically what he's looking for is a blow-job, more or less. If he weren't a big man (less a teddy bear than a grizzly at rest), it wouldn't work, or perhaps it would work too well (who can honestly listen to Chris Brown talk sweet nothings after his fists ran into Rihanna's face?). But laid down with a seductive groove, this paen to the material desires of the hip-hop entrepeneur (carnal and otherwise) is pretty damn good.

I think I've said it before, but a lot of the hip-hop that I respond to is from my past, the stuff that first broke the rap thing open in the late Eighties and early Nineties. I can enjoy songs from later on and even current songs (that one about the guy shopping at the thrift store? Priceless), but my love for the hip-hop I grew up with seems to be the winner. But I would throw "Big Poppa" up against any other song anyone else could suggest as something awesome that rewards multiple listens. Because no one else could pull off the following line: "If you got a gun up in your waist, please don't shoot up this place/Why?/'Cause I see some ladies tonight that should be having my baby, baby."

Poetry...

Colbert for Pope!

Just kidding...or am I?

February is my least-favorite month, because 1.) it's short, 2.) it comes right after January, which means that I'm still trying to catch up with that month's bills because I have additional things I have to pay, and usually work is a little slow this time of year, and 3.) it's the month that has my least favorite holiday...

President's Day.

Actually, Valentine's is the day I speak of, a mass-marketed, Hallmark-approved holiday in which one is supposed to go all out in the pursuit of some token that will let a special someone know that one is "in love" with them. And in my case, the offered token has never really led to the promised land of "Valentine's Day nookie" that I have often sought.

But I'm cool with that because (allow me to get sappy here) every day should be Valentine's Day. Not the cookie-cutter greeting-card romantic-comedy-starring-Jennifer-Aniston kind of holiday (I am firmly of Patton Oswalt's view that every romantic comedy should be called Who is Jennifer Anniston Gonna F*&K This Week?), but just set aside time every day to let people know that you care. Even if you have to fake it because you're related to them.

Anyway, I watched most of the Grammys for the first time since...well, since Arcade Fire won album of the year (2011?). It was nice to see CBS not screw up a major live event one week after the Fradulent Bowl in New Orleans got a thirty-minute delay due to someone not paying the Superdome's power bills. I think the 49ers got robbed, and I'm a Giants fan for pete's sake.

While I appreciate the clip of Adam Yauch in the "In Memoriam" roll, I do wish they'd taken a moment to dedicate a musical performance to the Beasties. He and Levon Helm were musical pioneers in their different fields, so it was nice to see the tribute to Levon from all those folks.

Anyway, February is almost over, my tax refund is in the mail, and barring a major health scare (you can only find out you have gallstones once) or car issues, I hope I can hold on to more of it than I have to spend for said issues (because something always comes up). And I hope my friend Sara finds a job soon. She's pretty awesome, potential employers who might be reading this.

And I hope you all have a magical Thanksgiving...Ramadan...whatever the hell holiday it is tomorrow.

Bullets Over Main Street

When I was a kid, I played Cowboys and Indians, or Yankees and Confederates (I was always a Confederate, by the way, even though blue is my favorite color), and I'll admit that it was hella fun to re-enact all the bloody( or -less) death scenes I'd seen in movies, the ones that featured shoot-outs between bad guys and good guys. I grew up in the Eighties, when Bruce Willis came out with Die Hard (still my favorite Christmas movie ever), and action movies were the rage. It was mindless fun, harmless as a shotgun blast to your imaginary stomach.

I think about that now, when kids are growing up with way more explicit depictions of said violence not just in movies but in video games and on TV shows, and I'm perfectly fine with it because, disagreeable as I find a lot of it, I don't think anyone's ever been killed by a violent video game. I could be wrong, but the statistics back me up on that one.

For months now, the gun-control debate has been raging, and what once was merely a human response to the tragedy of Newtown has, inevitably, become politicized, with both sides sidling up to get their message across. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm pro whichever side doesn't want to see more dead kids piled up because some nutcase decides he has to die but he has to take a lot of people with him. But I can see where the other side has their reasons.

Let's face it, the people who own guns (lots of guns, lots and lots of guns) are people that you don't want to piss off. Because they might just solve their issues with you with a bullet to the head (or. if they have an AR-15, a lot of bullets to what once was your head). And I understand that, as a nation born of violence (not just the Revolution, but going back to the first time settlers and the natives decided to fight over territory), we can't just say "no more guns" and be done with it. Guns are merely tools, to be fair. But they can be awfully lethal tools.

No one who "needs" to own an AR-15 or an assault rifle probably should own one. If your penis size is that worrisome to you, take a Viagra and throw a football through the tire swing a while. Will all the measures being proposed cut down on all gun violence? Probably not. But we need to have a dialog about what we can do to make sure that the likelihood of another Newtown, or Columbine, or Aurora is lessened. We don't need people automatically jumping to conclusions based on their particular political persuasions or whatever lobby is paying them off the most wants them to do.

I've avoided writing anything about this because, obviously, I don't like the idea of kids being gunned down, and I get emotional about it. I know that it's easier to blame violence in our media than the violence in our society, because you can regulate the violence in media. And there will never be a day when someone doesn't use a gun to solve their problems, no matter how many laws are on the books. But to say that we can't do anything, for fear that we'd piss off the portion of this country that values guns over lives, that lives in fear of a hypothetical government tyranny that so far has not been visited upon our shores and likely never will be, is obscene. It's a disgrace to the very nature of our country, that all men are created equal with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Sure, those words were written by a slave-owner, but the fact is that this country is always, and has always been, an attempt to bring ourselves closer to that ideal than we actually are. And all the gun enthusiasts in the world can't convince me that military-style weapons in the hands of ordinary citizens is the only bulwark we have against a homegrown Hitler. We're better than that, dammit. And our children deserve better than to be told "well, we'll put armed guards in your schools, that'll help."

Like I said, I've avoided writing about this for a while, and I'll admit that mine are not well-thought-out arguments per se. But that's why we need to stop playing politics and stop appealing to the worst instincts in the hornet's nest that is our political fringes. I would ask this of any NRA supporters I meet: how many more kids have to die before you concede that maybe you don't need all that firepower?

Just asking...