Birthdays are good for you. Statistics show that the people who have the most live the longest

Today is my brother's 32nd birthday. He's on the other side of the world since October, and won't be back until the end of this year, though I will get to see him in September on my trip. Happy happy joy joy.

So congrats, bro. One year closer to a mid-life crisis.

Like peas in a pod. Or is that carrots?
I know, I know, hard to tell who's who.

Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad

I got an email from an acquaintance today, saying that this was the best post I had written. I remember a few posts over the course of this blog vividly, but this, strangely enough was not one of them. So I read it, smiled at the beginning and then almost started crying when I read through it.

I'm still upset about the fact that my grandfather is not getting the dignified passing I always envisioned for him, and this is unlikely to change anytime soon.

Of course, Mah Girl was able to turn me around with a few simple words. “Remember good things about him, and not this. And rejoice in the fact that he will always be remembered, through your words.”

So I did. And I do. And I will. And I will remember him through the mechanical calendar, that my father set aside for me as he and other members of our extended family cleaned out The Old Man's apartment. In Swedish The Old Man is Den Gamle, abbreviated DG. He has gone by this name since before I was born. He will continue to go by this name after he is gone, and we'll all remember him with smiles on our faces.

And by all, I do mean all. One of my cousins has calculated that there are over 40 people descended from DG. Five generations. My grandfather's daughter, my father's sister, has a daughter who has a daughter who has a daughter. We are legion, for we are many.

The hardest job kids face today is learning good manners without seeing any

Oh. I forgot. I talked about good manners, and forgot all about the bad. That's very much out of character for me. So here goes.

On Saturday I spent time with very good and very nerdy friends. Having finished the game we were playing, we went to the local pizza/pasta place to grab some food. As we sat there, outside, Triangles, Ribbed For Her Pleasure and I, waiting for our food, Triangles said: “That kid is peeing in the street”.

And he was. Peeing. In the street. While his father stood beside him, watching. For all I know urging him on. The thing is, this is a residential street with an assortment of stores and restaurants, and slopes down towards a bigger road. Sloping down = pee running down.

We ignored this. Tore into our food. Ten minutes passed. Then Triangles says: “That kid is peeing in the street, too”.

I turned around. Again, he was. Peeing. In the street. Another kid. Father by his side. What. The. Hell. Seems like the street in question was a urinal. Very nice.

Is there something I'm missing here? Is it something that parents do, allow their kids to pee in the street? Please tell me. If yes, then I have yet another reason to never have children. That would be reason 138, I think. If no, then I might need to go all The Locker on that street and figure out if it's something that happens there a lot, and investigate further. Then again, we're talking about children peeing in the street, so maybe I should just let it go...

A salesman minus enthusiasm is just a clerk

So like I said yesterday, I spent Friday in one of our two newly opened stores. Unlike our competitors here in Sweden we've never had our own stores, and have reiterated our standpoint on having stores many times over the years. Not for us. A waste of money. Etc. But finally we did a 180 and got ourselves two stores, one in our own neighborhood, in the shopping mall within a stone's throw of our office, and the other in a big shopping mall in the southern part of Stockholm.

See, we're the cheap telecom operator. Oops, sorry, not cheap. Inexpensive. Big difference. Whatever. We're always aiming to have the lowest prices of the four operators in Sweden, and throughout the years we haven't really been associated with supplying quality services. So it's a stretch for us to launch concept stores, but that's what we've done.

And the orders from Up On High was that everyone in mobile product management should work two days in a store, to gain understanding of the business and our customers. We have a similar policy regarding customer service, in that all employees of the company should visit customer service once each year to listen to and preferably take calls from our subscribers.

I was really nervous about going to the store. I don't consider myself a sales person in any way, shape or form, and felt that perhaps potential customers might be a bit apprehensive about the whole “big bearded guy in huge pants” thing. So I dressed in jeans, all be it big ones and in a very dark blue, and combed the beard. Hell, I comb it at least twice every day, but it sounded like something you should do before going to work in a retail store.

Like the employees at the store I got to wear a tee sporting the company logo across the back and the symbol for one of our subscriptions across the chest. I almost felt like I belonged.

I acted customer service, I acted expert on the sales tool (which I am in fact somewhat of an expert on), I got to talk about subscriptions and phones and even had to answer some questions about SAR values (that's Specific Absorption Rate, go Google it). I even facilitated four or five sells that I handed over to the store employees. Commission for them, personal satisfaction for me. Oh well.

In all, a weird but rewarding experience. I'm going back on Sunday for four or five hours. The weekends are more chaotic, so I may not be so positive after that. We'll see.

Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy

I believe my parents did a good job raising me, if we talk about manners. Not sure they agree when it comes to cultural preferences...

So I consider myself a fairly well-mannered guy, in some respects. I know how to be out among people without screaming and cursing or licking people's backpacks. I hold the door at the train station if you're right behind me. I offer my seat on the bus or train to the elderly.

Sure, I've been known to scare a child or two to tears, but that was never intentional, and I tend to run people over in conversations from time to time, but that's not intentional either. I know I can come off as arrogant until you get to know me, but then you find out that I'm nice and lovable and all that jazz. And well-mannered, in most situations.

When someone returns the favor, I smile inwardly. Like when someone holds a door for me or says thank you when I do the same. However, sometime acts of courtesy take me completely by surprise, and I find myself smiling openly. Often it's when something happens that feels completely inappropriate for the situation, in the best possible way.

On Friday I sat waiting for a bus to go work in our newly opened store (that day in the store is a whole other post just waiting to be written), reading, headphones on. It was around nine in the morning. A girl sat down a meter or so away on the bench. 16-ish, wearing those awful gray sweatpants that have no business being worn outside, under any circumstances unless you're going home from the gym and barely then. Suddenly she tapped me on the shoulder.

I removed my headphones, and she said: “I just wanted to tell you that the label is still on your jacket”. Lo and behold, it was. I thanked her, and she continued. “And do you mind if I smoke?” I just stared at her, completely flabbergasted that she would even ask. My experience is that a lot of people that smoke will just light up without even bothering to check if someone is downwind of them. And teenage girls aren't exactly in that group that is likely to ask.

Finally I shook my head and said “No problem”. She nodded, sat back and lit up. I pulled my headphones back on and went back to my book. Pattern Recognition. By William Gibson. Again. Stared at the page for a while, not reading, just trying to comprehend what had just happened. Then smiled. Read.

Every city has secrets. But none as terrible as this

With emphasis on terrible.

When I was fifteen-ish I read a lot of Stephen King and Dean Koontz. A very small number of those books made enough of an impression that I can still remember them, and most of them were King's. Of Koontz's stuff it's only Twilight Eyes, which was the first of his that I read, and The Bad Place that I really remember.

Recently I discovered that Mr. Koontz had come up with his own twist on the Frankenstein mythos, mad scientists and monsters and all, and I decided to order the first part of the trilogy, Prodigal Son.

The reason I stopped reading Koontz was that I wanted more. Not more plot or more suspense or more monsters, no, I wanted better writing. The reason that Koontz has sold millions and millions of copies of his novels is that he writes page-turners, and not because you have to know what happens on the next page, but because you sit down and read and all of a sudden you've read 130 pages and it feels like you've just been flipping through them without reading them. The text requires only the slightest processing involving higher brain functions, and it moves through the reader like sterile water. Tasteless, transparent, forgettable.

And I also wanted less. Less clichés. Less formulaic plots and characters. After a couple of books it was very easy to pick out who would die when and who would hook up with who.

So my expectations concerning Prodigal Son were very low. I went into this novel suspecting I would be disappointed. And I was, and am.

I'm sorry to say that Prodigal Son is a POS. Piece of shit. While the idea of a modern twist on the Frankenstein myth appeals to me, it's poorly executed both in terms of story and writing, and I find myself annoyed whenever I read it. And cliché upon cliché upon cliché. Tiresome.

I will finish it, because I rarely put down a book. The exceptions being Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close that I had to put down because I started crying, and Gravity's Rainbow because I just couldn't handle it. I've read Extremely since then, and enjoyed it immensely, and while I intend to read Rainbow some time, I need to make my way through some earlier Pynchon before I tackle it again.

After Prodigal Son, I will probably reread The Road or Pattern Recognition to purge my system of this literary travesty. Again, with emphasis on terrible.

ADDED:
I just took a "Which crazy writer are you" quiz, and the result is here!

What are the odds?

Critics? How do they happen?

It was a fluke that got me into writing about music. Back in 1995, a friend and I walked into the local paper in Karlskoga and said “we want to review movies”. They looked at us, these journalists that had slaved away at a minor paper for twenty years, and said “Eh...you can't. The culture section does that”.

We did however get an offer to write for the youth section. It is a true sign of a great newspaper that they let just anyone walk in and start writing.

So we wrote reviews of ice cream and board games and books and the occasional text on pretty much whatever. Then, in what alcoholics refer to as “a moment of clarity”, I emailed a record company and asked for CDs for reviews. And they sent them! So I started reviewing CDs. I still have some of those first reviews, in my clippings folder, and they're horrible. Unspeakably horrible.

Then I moved to Sundsvall to go to college. I went to a Peace, Love and Pitbulls gig with some friends, and being music geeks, we stood there and had opinions on pretty much everything. A woman behind me asked if I knew the titles of the last few songs and I told her, in that condescending “my taste in music is better than you” way that I had back then (and still have, to some degree). That condescension gave me a job reviewing CDs for Sundsvall Tidning, which is a considerably bigger newspaper than Karlskoga's local rag.

After that I wrote for a couple of fanzines (this was back in the day when fanzines were still paper, made using a Xerox machine) and yet another paper in a city I went to college in. Then along came Supersatan, in maybe 1998 or 1999.

Yet another treasure from the depths of my closet

And here's a question for Hans. How did I come to write for Supersatan? I can't remember.

Supersatan was a metal site, where I wrote reviews and did interviews and such. I think I interviewed earthtone9 there, as well as P3 Rocks Håkan Persson. Writing there was a lot of fun, and we got a lot of attention and readers. Then one of Sweden's premier rock journalists wrote a column in Close-Up Magazine praising our site as Sweden's best metal site in Swedish, and specifically mentioned me as a writer with pretty much the same taste in music as he has.

About a month later I got an email from the editor of Close-Up asking if I wanted to write there. Which is an offer you don't refuse if you write about metal in Sweden. Mostly I did reviews of CDs, but I also wrote a couple of columns and did some interviews. I got to fly to London to see the first European gig Linkin Park ever did, where they played for a bunch of journalists, some record company bigwigs and a handful of fans. Business class there and back and one night in a fancy London hotel on the record company's dime, and all they got was half a page where the band answered The Basic Questions. Hardly a fair trade, but I didn't complain.

In 2002 I stopped writing for Close-Up because I had sort of a nervous breakdown (more on that some other time), and once I was back on my feet I started writing for Slavestate, which back then was an actual magazine. All of a sudden I could pretty much pick and choose which bands I wanted to do interviews with, and I got a lot more printed than in Close-Up. I've done interviews with Slipknot, Machine Head, Isis, Ministry, Cult of Luna, Type O Negative, Prong, Devin Townsend, 36 Crazyfists, Poison the Well, Burst, Pelican, etc (yes, namedropping galore, but that's what you should expect from me).

I'm still writing for Slavestate, though not as often as I did back in the day and not as often as I would like. Time is something that has been in shorter and shorter supply over the last couple of years. But I'm happy I'm still writing, because expressing my opinions about music is one of my favorite pastimes.