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Weblog | I don't like the word blog, it's ugly. Anyway, new content happens here. (Swedish dito)

About me and the site | Twenty-something male who likes text. Obsessed with things such as books, reality, communication, and one or two tv-shows.

Archives | Things written here since... well, 2001. Some of it is good, some is utter shait.

Books | Books read, not books written. So far I've struggled to maintain unpublished.

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Links | Outwards, away, flee.

e-mail | J. Nicklas Andersson

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2002-05-20

I’m having serious problems with this. This being the fact that The Ramones did a cover on a Tom Waits-piece entitled I don’t wanna grow up (read lyrics) and somehow — don’t ask me how — managed to make it both longer and less rebellious. Yes, The Ramones, go figure. Perhaps the less rebellious bit is that Joey Ramone never sung with a really raspy voice. Waits can probably grind down solid steel if he just feels like it.

When the song was recorded the Ramones had already lost their ticket to ride the train of the experimental rebels. Had they only made this song in the old days before they became a part of the canon: who can say what would have happened? But then again, this is not a song from the old Tom Waits but from the more recent where he is in tune with his inner child in a frightening way.

But the other thing, the length is wrong on several levels and it gives me this headache thing just by trying to grasp it. The weird part is that they actually played and sung the song faster than Mr Waits did - or perhaps still do at live-shows. You know, the usual three-chords-and-we’re-done type of thing that they always used. So how the fuck could it become longer? They didn’t add words. Longer pauses between the verses perhaps but considering that they did everything faster, where does those extra fifteen seconds come from? Thin air? Stolen from another album?

I want some answers here.

12:30. Woke up. A thought dawned on me as I lay there under the blanket. I need a bathrobe. And, of course, a pair of white bunny slippers just as everyone else does. But a bathrobe. An ugly one with large pockets and I should be able to throw it recklessly open if the need every come up — yeah, right. I’m thinking about getting something to eat.

13:00. I’m eating. Meat and potatoes. That’s the beauty of waking up late, no need for breakfast. It is possible to jump straight at lunch. Still, even if I had waked up early I wouldn’t have had breakfast; I just doesn’t do them anymore. Kind of sad and pathetic really. I’m still eating by the way.

15:22. On drugs. Not the kind you go “whoooa” after, but the one that prevents you from going “atcchhhiiii” when in body contact with plants outside. Sometimes I which they where the other kind but then I shrug, I’m pretty fucked up anyway. At least this way I have some illusion of self-control.

18:00. Met some people. I didn’t like them, not at all.

-- Hi. We’ve never seen you around here before.
-- I don’t like this neighbourhood, so I usually avoid this place.
-- Okay, I take it someone here has a personality disorder and it isn’t any of us.
-- Bite me.
-- Why so hostile? What you name?
-- I’m Raymond. You’re in my face.
-- Ray. Stop being an ass, okay? We’re just...
-- Mondo. I don’t like to be called Ray by strangers. You’re strangers and should call me Mondo.
-- Mondo? What does that mean?
-- Look it up, there is this thing called books and some of them have definitions of other words in them. Dic-tion-ari-es.
-- You have a serious problem. You know that, don’t you?
-- Yes. You.
-- Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your...
-- Shut the fuck up. I came here to shop pasta okay? Not to be harassed by other customers who tries to “save me” from what they consider great peril and eternal torment.
-- You don’t have to be rude.
-- Rude!? I want bloody pasta. That is all I came here for not some overdose of religious propaganda. And by the way. I don’t need to be saved. I sacrifice goats in my apartment and have huge bonfires in my bathroom where my heathen friends and I have orgies in the ashes. And sometimes, I even nail a small marshmallow Jesus to an equally small wooden cross so that I can play Golgotha in my cat’s kitty litter.
-- ...
-- I’m gonna take my pasta, pay for it and then leave. Bye.
-- Do you want a pamphlet?

22:45. Got abducted by a UFO. They, they here being the pesky aliens, dumped me after fifteen minutes and stole my pasta. Damn the bastards. Have to go back and buy more tomorrow, something that I do not look forward to. I alos have to hitchhike home. This is going to take all night. Right now at a Internet Cafe in Utah, boy do they have comfortable chairs here or what? Need coffee though.