Band of the week.
Alex Rock truly is lazy. Once, he almost died from sheer laziness. I shit you not.
It all happened one summer’s day several years ago, when Rock had a job at a summer camp for retarded kids. He had three main duties: sitting at a card table in the woods twiddling his thumbs, mopping up retard shit in the event of an “accident,” and maintaining the grounds. It was his laziness in the performance of this last duty that almost lead to his untimely demise.
Rock had just finished some grounds work, and was driving the tractor back to the garage. For those of you haven’t been to this camp, or seen the commercial for the AlTech Deluxe Knock-it-down Kit (filmed at the same camp, after we broke in), the garage is at the top of a big hill near the entrance. The rest of the camp is downhill from there, and there’s a gravel road that winds around the hill so you can drive up it at a fairly shallow grade.
There Rock sat, perched atop a tractor at the base of the hill, contemplating it. At the top was the garage, and hours of blissful inactivity before someone would come looking for him. Slowly, an idea formed in his head. Gears began to turn, and long-lost lessons in geometry were dredged up. The shortest distance between two points, he reasoned, is a straight line. In light of this fact, the road seemed like an awful waste of time. Rock put the tractor in low gear and pointed it straight at the garage.
He chugged up the hill, mind elsewhere. He started off well, but sure enough, as the hill became steeper, the tractor’s center of gravity moved farther and farther back. Up the front wheels went, and in an instant, Rock’s life flashed before his eyes. The tractor rolled back, with Alex clinging to the steering wheel.
It was a cart full of dirt that saved Alex’s life and made possible such grand accomplishments as the AlTech Deluxe Auto-man. He had been towing the cart behind the tractor, and as it started to flip over, the tow bar between the two wedged against the ground, preventing the tractor from flipping over onto our hero. As soon as he caught his breath, Alex jumped off the machine and coaxed it back to the base of the hill, which he then climbed by the more conventional path.
You’d think that Alex would have learned a valuable lesson that day about cutting corners to save work, but as I read his blog these days, I begin to wonder if he’s forgotten the dangers of such half-assery. Specifically, I am referring to his two most recent entries, in which he has forgone stupid facts and irrelevant stories — usually a comic goldmine for a Renaissance man such as himself — and instead turned to music reviews in an effort to fill space with as little creative effort as possible. This is unacceptable.
I will set aside for a moment the disturbing possibility, unlikely as it may be, that Alex Rock is becoming a hipster — a man so focused on proving his coolness by demonstrating a taste for obscure, shitty music that he fails to realize that he is, in point of fact, a douchebag. I lived with such a man for my entire sophomore year of college, and I swear a holy oath that if Alex Rock becomes like that, I will kill him as an act of mercy.
I have too much faith in Rock to see that happening, though. Rock has always been something of a technical genius and all around badass, and he once almost beat the shit out of Dan Cramer, so I will give him the benefit of the doubt. Also, he has never cared too much about being cool, so I think that laziness is the prime motive here. Those of us who have come to appreciate his unique take on desk objects and socks can only hope that in the future, he will muster up the gumption to provide his adoring public with a bit of original material.
Speaking of both unoriginality and music, I have more to report from the land of labor. Like many stores, the grocery store that I work at has music playing in the background. Most people don’t pay attention to it, and I don’t blame them, but when it is three am and you are one of six people in the store, you start to notice that not only are the same songs repeated every night, but that they are stupid. You get to paying attention to the lyrics — usually a no-no with popular music. You get to puzzling over what they could possibly mean. Finally, blood shoots out your nose and you drop dead.
I submit for your consideration the lyrics to several songs that are allegedly popular. By popular, I mean, “Played on the radio at work.”
To begin with, we have our old friend Clay Aiken — idol of the Aiken Moms and singer of the song, “Invisible,” the lyrics of which are, in part, below.
“What are you doing tonight?
I wish I could be a fly on your wall . . .
If I was invisible
Then I could just watch you in your room
If I was invisible
I’d make you mine tonight
If hearts were unbreakable
Then I can just tell you where I stand
I would be the smartest man
If I was invisible
(Wait. I already am).”
This sounds at first like a love song about a loser who wants some girl, but if you listen a little more closely, it starts to seem a little creepy. Does the thought of an invisible Clay Aiken secretly watching you give you the willies? How about the knowledge that he may already have? That’s right — if you take a look at the song, the first half is essentially a complicated if-then statement. If Clay Aiken were invisible, then he would creep into your room and make you his, possibly this very evening. Late in the song, he confronts us with the horrible truth — he has already become invisible. He could be anywhere, just watching you in your room.
I was going to have a second song here, but got lazy. Instead, I will just conclude by saying that Maroon 5 sucks. The end.
{democracy:10}