First Post of 2007!

While sitting in front of the TV (that’s an idiot box, for you luddites) watching a Seinfeld marathon, I brainstormed resolutions for 2007. “Why pick the same things you always pick?” I asked myself. “Why carry over resolutions from a previous year?” That just stresses you out. “Instead,” I thought, “why not choose resolutions that you’ll enjoy attempting, that you may actually accomplish?”

1. Drink the rest of the beer in my beer fridge. That may sound like an easy task -- and it could be, seeing as I’m still unemployed I do have the time -- but you never know. Every time I get around to deciding to do some “cleaning,” something happens and more beer makes its way into the fridge. It’s like a magic beer refrigerator in a way. Except that it’s not free magic -- the suds cost money which, even when I’m virtually broke, seems to find its way into my pocket and then my hand and then the hand of the sales clerk.

Now, a beer fridge is a nice thing to have. Beth and I think it’s an attractive selling point for the house, at least for the man, or the dad, or whomever who works his way through the upstairs, looking at all the rooms in that disinterested, male kind of way, follows the real estate agent (often female) and his wife downstairs and into the basement, which is set up pretty decently as a workshop area. There’s the cabinets against the inner wall with a hard ply board nailed to the top for working, plus we have a workbench, half a dozen saws and mauling instruments in the corner, some rakes and a giant shovel which I hauled out of the shed this fall because it does a great job shoveling leaves. Yes, we had that many leaves. So he walks in and immediately perks up. “Ah!” he thinks, “that’s more like it.

Then, oh gloriously then, they all turn left into what the former owners used as a spare bedroom, and see a full-sized pool table done in red felt, a cricket dart board on the wall, boom box, backgammon board, and there, next to the couch, a mini-fridge. “I wonder if…” he thinks to himself, and opens the little door to reveal yes, as many beers as a man can jam into a mini-fridge. Now of course, people buying the home might just turn that room right back into a kid’s bedroom, but, like the TV show “Sell This House” reveals, people have an easier time imagining how much they’ll enjoy a place if you help them out visually. Plus, if they want it, the pool table goes with the sale. No extra charge.

But the beer ought to be fresh, though the guy can’t possibly know whether it is or not, and so it needs constant replacing. Problem is, whenever I have guests over, even knowing in advance that they will most undoubtedly bring beer (as they always have), I still panic at the last second and go out and buy a couple six packs. Then, the guest or guests come, all bearing sixes of their own. Some of said sixes get consumed, and the remainders crowd up the fridge. I’ll have one or two while playing darts or pool, but I usually only drink in company, so after a while, all those beers start to go stale. So, my New Year’s Resolution numero uno is to go through the entire lot, drinking what I can and chucking what is absolutely intolerable. Meaning the horribly stale beer, any skunked bottles and all the Natural Lights.

Empty fridge, here you come!

2. Sell my first country song. Some years ago I was sitting in a brew pub (that I no longer go to because I hate every selection they have) with two friends (who are no longer my friends for reasons I’d prefer not to go into) and we were joking about the hilarity of those “working man” country songs that seem to always involve romantic breakups and pickup trucks, when I started to sing my own make-it-up-on-the-spot lyric about how my dog ran away with my wife. I can’t recall just how the tune went, but it was pretty darn good. Or it seemed that way at the time. Of course, we were in a bar, drinking.

This afternoon, while the wife and I were engaged in a forced absence from our humble abode so complete strangers could walk through the rooms of the house peering into cabinets and commenting on the state of the paint job, we were sitting outside a Remington Grill (temps hit 62 degrees today) reading the paper and being subjected to the most God-awful series of jarring and discordant notes and vocalizations that anyone should ever have to hear. It was the latest -- and who knows, maybe the greatest -- in country music. While I sat there, trying not to gag, I thought to myself: “I could write music that bad.” So, maybe I will.

Well, that’s the list.

I’ve only come up with the two so far, but I welcome one and all to feel free to make some suggestions of their own. Be nice. Or not nice. To quote a tunester comic from Chapel Hill who once wrote a song about being sexually molested by Ronald McDonald (set to the tune of Charlie Daniels’ Uneasy Rider): “It’s the same difference -- makes no difference to me.”