My Life and Code

One of the things I was writing about here a few weeks ago was music, and how certain songs can trigger memories. And I've had this project for the past few years to assemble a playlist of songs which are, in essence, the soundtrack to my life.  Currently, it exists as a Google Doc, with a list of songs broken down by the period of my life which I associate them with. I'll eventually compile it into a playlist and listen to it, but for now, it's a document I update whenever an additional song or two comes to mind. For this project, I have a couple of ground rules. The songs included should all evoke mild to strong time and/or place associative memories when I hear them. The songs should evoke good memories, or bittersweet memories, but not bad  memories. It hasn't been something I could just sit down and complete all at once. There were songs that immediately came to mind when I started, and then others which have come to mind later. I also don't own  all of the son...

I’ve been fortunate in my life to have known a lot of good people, but sadly, more than a few have passed away too soon. Some I knew well, some were casual friendships, some were coworker friends. Some were in my life a long time, some just a short while. But all of them left an impact. I often reflect on the people I was lucky to cross paths with. Our lives can be influenced by the people around us and the time they are with us. The trajectory of the path we take can be guided by those who are there at the right time. Below are the names of people I still think of, appreciate, and am thankful for. I’m a better person for having known them. Alice Hughes / Bill Hottenstein / Br. Mark McBride / Bruce Grimmer / Dave Tyson / Drew Rusin / Jay Winslow / Jen (Skahan) Brock / Jen Monti / Matt Grom / Richie Peto / Rob Daninger

I'm a huge fan of most things 1970s, and I recently heard of this movie via a post on Reddit. It's about a sniper who has his sights set on the crowd at a football championship game (they're careful to never refer to it as a Super Bowl). It's sort of in the vein of those 1970s disaster films, except it's not really about a disaster. But it has that same vibe. While I liked the film, here's the problem with it: editing. Or, more specifically, the lack thereof. I have no problem with character building. I have no problem with a movie taking it's time to establish a plot, or characters, or whatever. But by the time this film actually got along with the plot, I paused it to see how much time had passed, and it was halfway through the film.  In fact, at the time of this writing, if you look the film up on Wikipedia, the summary of the film written there starts at the midway point of the film . The opening credits sequence was an early red flag. A long....long.......

In 1982's Blade Runner , Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is tasked with hunting down four renegade replicants , humanoid robots which are virtually indistinguishable from real people. And fans of the film often debate whether or not Deckard himself is a replicant. The debate originates with director Ridley Scott, who has gone on the record by  saying as much , years after the film's original release. But here's the thing: one of the screenwriters, Hampton Fancher, says that Deckard is not a replicant (though he likes the ambiguity), and Harrison Ford, until recently, has been adamant that Deckard is human (a recent change of opinion on his part seems... paid for , so to speak, in my opinion, and it's well known that he and Scott disagreed vehemently on it). The filming of a scene, post-production, with a unicorn that ties into a scene at the end of the film is meant to imply Deckard is a replicant, and to be fair, there is a line which was cut from the film where the chara...

I used to know this girl named Crystal, who was a friend of a girlfriend back in the day. For some reason she crossed my mind recently. On Fridays and Saturdays we’d hang out with my girlfriend at the time’s circle of friends, and Crystal appeared in that group near the end of our relationship. Kind of like when a new character is introduced in the last season of a TV show, she just sort of showed up near the end. Crystal didn’t like me and was pretty open about it. She’d say to my girlfriend, right in front of me , “You can do so much better than him.” I’m not sure why she disliked me so much, and as for doing better, granted, I was no Brad Pitt, but I was a decent enough guy, albeit with faults. Crystal had a boyfriend, and he too was no Brad Pitt, so I don’t know who she was to judge. And as for him being a decent enough guy: pin in that. Even though she was always openly critical of me, I never said anything about it, and just rolled with it. I’m not really sure why. I was always...

If you're cursed with nostalgia and sentimentality like I am (and I only jokingly refer to it as a curse), you may have found that there are two things that can immediately take you back to a time and place long gone. At least, for me, there are two things that easily trigger that: scents and music. I'll talk about the latter here. Not every song does it. But some are just so engrained in a memory that the reaction is immediate: there I am again, the feeling of a time and place returns, I'm a certain age again, reliving a time long gone. And it's often bittersweet -- maybe it's just me, but a lot of those sorts of memories are a mix of happiness (for the experience at the time) and sadness (for the fact that it's over, only to be relived as a memory -- "you can't go home again", they say). There's something that Alex Van Halen once said, that I was trying to find the source for as I wrote this, about there being comfort in the past because it n...