The Maz

I've been missing Mazatlan a lot lately. It's just, for me, spring is kind of synonymous with the place. It was Spring 1995 when I first started to feel comfortable there and it was spring 1996 when I returned and felt like I had come home. To give you an idea, I checked out a map of the city's bus routes and could just about feel myself there again, imagining the city as I rode through it, remember the sites, the landmarks, the neighborhoods and even the street names. Part of the problem is my tendency to indulge nostalgia. Mazatlan was great and I dwell on that, wishing there was a way I could recapture the time I spent there, the things I felt there, all that stuff. It's only compounded by the fact that if I went back to visit, it would be as tourist. I'd spend maybe a week there and come home. There would be no way to get back what I experienced there 10 years. I guess that's why people say you can never go home again. You can't. The past has passed. But I'd like to think I could live there again someday. It seems the only way, in my mind, to reconnect with the city, the culture, the people, the members, is to live there. Then I could troll the markets, eat the food, visit the members, go to church, introduce Becky to everything wonderful about the city, give my girls some culture. I'll keep dreaming, keep wishing I was pulling in seven figures a year so I could buy a little bungalow in downtown Maz and eat all the sweet, sweet Mexican food I wanted. I guess I better write that book.

I've been accused of being a music snob. As you can see, I've clearly come down hard on Dave for being a Creed fan and as such negate most of his music opinions because he's a fan.

I should say, I've always tried to keep the attitude live and let live. When it comes to music, listen to whatever floats your boat -- I won't judge.

But I draw the line at people who have scienfically provable bad taste in music yet 1. claim they have excellent taste in music and 2. scorn others for that they deem as their bad taste in music (And I know this is where I teeter on hypocrisy).

But don't get the wrong idea. I'm really not this anal. And I'm a big fan of the guilty pleasure -- you know, typically bad music you like regardless (I've been known to crack out the Enrique Iglesias and Huey Lewis and the News from time to time). But by very nature of being a guilty pleasure, you're acknowledging the music is bad. And that's the problem, it would seem in Dave's case, there's no guilt. He's arguing the music is good to begin with.

And, in the end I wouldn't care about any of this. Exept that he continually tries to argue the point that U2 is a sucky band, when obvioulsy we can all see this simply isn't the case. I easily acknowledge there are people on this planet who don't like U2 or can't stand Bono, but most of those people fess up to the fact that the band is dang good at what they do. Start arguing something else and I'm gonna come down on you like a ton of Barry Manilow records.