GRABBINGSAND

Category: Memories

  • Tales of the Blue Dahlia

    When I was in high school, I belonged to a garage band. The second of two that’d had me as a member, this one was called Blue Dahlia. I’d come up with the name, an amalgamation of my favorite niche metal band at the time (Blue Murder) and the title of a James Ellroy true…

  • Throwback: The Reclaimed and Revisited Summeration Mix of 2008

    Back in June of 2008, I went to work on a summer mix. Calling it good enough, I posted it here. Five years and a month later, I was surprised to find that particular ZIP hanging out on a mostly abandoned file sharing website. Once I remembered the password, I reclaimed that stack of tracks…

  • Throwing Myself into The Ocean at the End of the Lane

    Warning: This is less of a review and more of an outright attempt to process. As such, here be spoilers. And here be memories. And here be perhaps more than you bargained for. I believe Neil Gaiman to be one of our finest living authors. He is my favorite, certainly. I’ve read and enjoyed his…

  • A Children’s Sermon, Interrupted

    I ingratiated myself with the District Superintendent entirely by accident. I was observant, merely. It was an event for the DS to arrive at our little church, so small that our pastor was shared with another house of worship some five or six miles away. As I understood it, the DS was a bigger minister…

  • Childhood Theology

    Children are little theologians, seeking and defining the gods that control the universe as they perceive it. Most of the tiny gods that made up my very own pantheon, they’re gone now. Through Knowing Better and the simple forgetfulness that keeps us all relatively sane, I ask no longer as many questions as kept my…

  • The 100 Things, Revisited

    Back in May 2003, I was eager to participate in all manner of Internet activity that could even possibly be construed as community-based, even potentially so. The Internet had given me so much even then and I just wanted to hug it. So I participated in occasional things like Heather Champ’s Mirror Project (which I…

  • The Most Glamorous Timelord, Ever

    Mary Tamm. Still the most glamorous Timelord, ever. I remember watching the “Key To Time” episodes from Who’s season 16 when I was a teenager, delayed a number of years from their original broadcast thanks to GPTV’s erratic acquisition of new or unseen Who episodes. Romana, if I’m honest entirely, struck my teenaged mind in…

  • 1982: Thirty Years Ago

    Thirty years ago this week, I turned ten. I’d learned the word “decade” a few weeks earlier, so I imagine I tormented many a questioning adult thusly. “Happy Birthday! How old are you?” “A decade.” To my parents, a look, maybe a phrase like “He’s a character, all right.” President Reagan was in office and…

  • Little Lives

    My first pet wasn’t my own pet.  It was my brother’s dog, a beagle named Peanut.  He stayed in a largish pen in the backyard, thanks to the leash laws in our county.  He probably was meant to be a hunting dog, but he didn’t hunt a thing.  His talent was howling, which he would…

  • So Long Lives This: Pondering Kurt Cobain (A JIVE Re-Post)

    Today. An anniversary deserving of recognition, even if you hold little admiration for the man. Conspiracies abound to the contrary, but seventeen years ago this week, Kurt Cobain died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Seattle. The death of Kurt Cobain affected the children of the late 70s / early 80s far more than it…