The Beer I Had for Breakfast

 Nicole and I have talked fairly often about how frequently it happens that we are going about our day and suddenly an innocent word or phrase sets off a song in our head. I think we both use songs as post titles, although Nicole does it more often maybe, and they make more sense. Last night I was at a last-minute birthday get-together and there was a last-minute cake, and the last-minute birthday boy was cutting the cake and Collette counted everyone at the table 'one two three four five six seven eight nine' and I was like how am I the only one singing The Ten Duel Commandments?

This reminded me of when I was catching up on blogs after we got home from Vancouver and Nicole's second-to-last post was called Alone Again, Naturally. 

I have a weird hole in my music familiarity, I'm not sure why except maybe that I went to university and lived in residence for two years and then a student house, and I wasn't really engaged in the music coming out during those years - we listened to cassette tapes (The Proclaimers and Jane Siberry, over and over) and weird bands that came to play in Faculty Hollow. I go to Bluesfest sometimes to see some early 90s band thinking maybe I will recognize the music, and I usually do not. 

So there is what I listened to when I started driving around and listening to the radio again, and then there is the deep deep dive stuff, which Alone Again, Naturally prompted, which is my parents' eight tracks in our car and trailer. This was a lot of Gordon Lightfoot, Abba, the Irish Rovers and random country collections (we were eclectic?) I heard Alone Again, Naturally so many times at camp, and also the song Sunday Morning Coming Down, which when I was little was hilarious to me - "Well I woke up Sunday mornin'/ With no way to hold my head that didn't hurt/ And the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad/ So I had one more for dessert/ Then I fumbled in my closet through my clothes/ And found my cleanest dirty shirt." What a crazy clown this guy was! Beer for breakfast! Cleanest dirty shirt! Then I got older and realized it was about a minimally functional alcoholic questioning all of his life choices, cool, pass the marshmallows.

When we were in Vancouver one of Eve's friend's pseudo-famous friends (I don't really know what this means but I want one) gave them free tickets to a Tate McRae concert - this is someone they don't love as a singer but she's a really good dancer, and they wouldn't have bought tickets, but were happy to go for free (there was some musing over whether she could post pictures on social media while making it clear that the tickets were free. This is a problem that I have never had.) Eve's housemate lives in Vancouver but was still living in Hamilton over the summer, but then Eve found out that she was in town for her driver's test while we were there. She said "I bet she's going to the concert" and she was, but the second night, so we just had dinner with her and Eve's BFF, which was an enjoyable combining of the old and the new.

While the girls were at the concert, Katherine and I went to Theatre Under the Stars in Stanley Park. It was Legally Blonde, and I was a little bit surprised at how much I loved it, and how polished the performances were. It was basically lawn chairs and we had walked a lot during the day, and I was a little worried I would be sleepy and uncomfortable, but I was neither.

Now I'm just saying random music stuff to justify that I felt compelled to write about how I've had dessert beer on my mind for the last few days and it's Nicole's fault. We had a great trip to Vancouver and Matt had fun camping and I am ready to write about that now that I've emptied my head of Johnny Cash being melancholy. Maybe he was out Looking for the Heart of Saturday Night before Sunday Morning Came Down. Maybe he Didn't Like Mondays. I would like to go on record as vowing that I have never had beer for breakfast. I might have had a Harvey Wallbanger once, but that has orange juice.