MY FAVORITE ALBUMS OF 2008:
Deerhunter - Microcastle/Weird Era Cont.
No Age - Nouns
Vampire Weekend - S/T
Hold Steady - Stay Positive
Girl Talk - Feed The Animals
Be Your Own Pet - Get Awkward
Santogold - S/T
The Gaslight Anthem - The '59 Sound
Lil' Wayne - The Carter III
Austrian Death Machine - Total Brutal
Weezer - S/T (The Red Album)
Fleet Foxes - S/T
Dillinger Four - CIVILWAR
Fucked Up - Chemistry Of Common Life

Playlist for 2008 Year In Review:
Deerhunter - Nothing Ever Happened
No Age - Teen Creeps
Cut Copy - Out There On The Ice
Be Your Own Pet - Becky
CSS - Rat Is Dead (Rage)
Vampire Weekend - The Kids Don't Stand A Chance
M83 - Kim & Jessie
Noah & The Whale - Five Years Time
Santogold - Lights Out
Lil' Wayne - Dr Carter
The Gaslight Anthem - The '59 Sound
Why? - Fatalist Palmistry
Beck - Gamma Ray
The Cool Kids - Bassment Party
Fucked Up - Twice Born
Fleet Foxes - White Winter Hymnal
The Hold Steady - Constructive Summer
Kanye West - Robocop
TV on the Radio - Golden Age
Weezer - Dreamin'
Flight Of The Conchords - Business Time

It feels like I've always had back pain. I chalk it up to the fact that I have a bit of a pony keg hanging off of my torso where a six pack should be. The back pain is something that I've always just assumed as a given. I strained my back lifting a box of books at Borders a long time ago and just assumed that I'd always have a bit of chronic back pain.
Leg pain on the other hand is a bit different. Over the last couple years I'd get sore in my hip and it'd radiate down my leg. Soon my knee was always sore and then my ankle was always sore. I chalked this up to me favoring my back.
A few months ago I found that my right leg would feel like it fell asleep at random times. I'd be in the middle of walking and all of a sudden it would feel like it was taking a nap. This sensation was a bit more worrisome. I thought it was a circulation problem and went to the doctor.
My doctor couldn't figure out what was going on. He had me get x-rays done on my back and my knee but they didn't show anything too abnormal. So he had me go see an orthopedic specialist. They had me get an MRI (which I did a couple of weeks ago) and that showed that I have a pretty severe bulging disc in my lower back. The discs in your spine are discs of cartilage that are like shock absorbers between the vertebrae.

This isn't my disc but to give you an idea this is kind of what my MRI looked like. The white part is the spinal cord and instead of just pushing into it a little bit the disc pretty much is in so far that it obscures the spinal cord from view in the MRI.
My treatment options are awesome! I can either get back surgery or I can undergo a procedure where they inject the disc with pain medicine to decrease my back and leg pain and steroids to reduce the swelling in the disc.
Here's a description of the procedure. I guess I can do this up to three times in a year. They'll monitor the progress after the first injection. If the injections don't really reduce the swelling the next step would be back surgery, if I was so inclined. The doctor yesterday was trying to convince me that since I'm young and I don't really have any risk factors that surgery might be the preferred method over these injections but I don't know. Back surgery seems like a super last resort.
If this can reduce my back and leg pain (which honestly has limited how much exercise I find myself being able to endure) that would be pretty amazing. I was pretty astounded to find that I don't really have to live with pain.

So as far as straight up punk bands go I'd be hard pressed to name a band I like better than the Germs. GI is an amazing LP, their whole discography (handily collected on the MIA CD) is amazing to me. Love the Germs.

Much to Jess's chagrin I've toyed with the idea of getting the Germs circle tattooed on my body from time to time but part of me was always kind of against it, I don't know if it's the whole "American Sid Vicious" image that Darby Crash ran with or what but there was always something a little too cheesy (as is usually the case with punk rock ideologies) for me to get that simple awesome logo tattooed on my body.

And now hindsight 20/20 I'm stoked that I never took that plunge.

The Germs have reunited with Shane West (Darby Crash in the upcoming movie "What We Do Is Secret") as their singer. WTF? This is a terrible idea. This is worse than The Doors reuniting without Jim Morrison, since you know, the Germs from the get go were all about pushing personal limits and deconstructing what a rock show and a rock band should be. Not really about making bucks on the Warped Tour.

Note to bands: If your major draw and the reason that you're so revered as a band is your enigmatic frontman and said enigmatic frontman ODs or dies in some other way usually it's best to let your band die as well. Otherwise you look like moneygrubbing freaks and generally your fans will lose all reverence they have for your band. K? Thanks!

So yeah, I shouldn't be too surprised. After all the Dead Kennedys already opened this door years ago. It just sucks when a band i give a shit about goes down this kind of path.

Here's the trailer for the new Germs Movie:

I guarantee it won't be as exciting as the Germs segment on The Decline Of Western Civilization:

Ummmm Whoah...

>

Feel like dying young and leaving a bloated corpse? Try the french fry coated Bacon on a stick.

 

I feel fatter having posted this.

from: The Last Appetite

This is the first post on my new project over at http://descendentssongs.blogspot.com. I'm going to be writing a lot more over there so check it out from time to time.

Myage

    This song was my introduction to the Descendents. My whole life listening to music can be separated into two eras: B.D. (Before Descendents) and A.D. (wait a sec...).
     Before I heard this song I was a typical teenager in the mid 90s. My first concert and my favorite band was Metallica (saw em in August of 1994 before the haircuts) but I was finding myself more and more often listening to "Alternative Rock." I liked Nirvana after seeing them on Saturday Night Live after In Utero came out. This was mostly due to the fact that Dave Grohl beat the hell out of his drums with a fury that I found inspiring as a drummer who could hit hard but didn't have the technical reach of someone like Lars Ulrich (hahaha, if I only could see a couple years in the future).
     I definitely was wooed by punk rock. I got the SPIN Guide to Alternative Music and it became my bible. When I would make it to Media Play with my paychecks from delivering flowers on the weekend I started mixing in the Ramones, Sex Pistols and Wire into my purchases alongside alt rock and rap faves like Smashing Pumpkins and Helmet and Snoop Dogg.
     I couldn't fully commit myself to punk rock though, I thought musically it was just a little too much "sounds the same" or wasn't actually musical (this for some reason was a big deal to me when I was that age, again B.D.)
     I also thought new punk rock was annoying mostly. I liked Green Day, Bad Religion Rancid and the Offspring but they were practically alternative rock. I found NOFX, Lagwagon, and most of the bands on Fat and Epitaph (what all of my punk rock friends were listening to) to be mostly lacking and couldn't figure out how someone could claim that Punk Rock saved their lives.

    And then there was Milo.

    My friend Roger and his friends Nik and Yuri were starting a punk band and they were looking for a drummer. Roger had made me a mix tape of punk rock songs they had thought about covering, so I could learn some songs that we could actually practice. The only songs that really stuck with me were Screeching Weasel's cover versions of The Ramones. I wasn't that into the tape but I did want to play music with someone and this seemed like it could be fun. So I jumped in.
     One day before or after we had practiced, I don't really recall the details, we were going somewhere in Roger's truck. He popped in a tape of Milo Goes To College (I had read about this album, which had gotten a 10 and was one of Spin's top 100 alternative music albums, so I was excited to check it out).
The first thing I heard was Tony Lombardo's peppy caffeinated bassline, so far so good I thought and then it hit me like a ton of bricks. Bill Stevenson's snare roll, Wipeout on speed, kicks in sync with Frank Navetta's surfy guitar joining in and I all of a sudden understood what all the hub bub was about. Before Descendents, I thought punk music was three chords with someone singing about anarchy or about sniffing glue or some other concept that I didn't have any personal stake in. This was different though. The music was fast, it was energy, it felt like it belonged to me. The lyrics, from what I could gather, were about a girl the singer has a crush on who probably didn't know he existed. This was something I knew a lot about. "She don't need no one" sang the chorus and by the second time it rolled along it was hard not to sing along.
    Before this song was over my life had changed forever. For better or worse, I was a convert to the church of punk rock and I wanted more...

What are you listening to that I should be listening to?
Seriously open to just about anything besides christian music and pop country.

So we got this in the mail yesterday:

 

Someone at KFC:

a) is a huge South Park Fan

b) is completely oblivious

c) has a weird sense of family values.

Here are some phone pics I took of Dez yesterday.I'll be posting some more in the next day or two!

Desmond Logan Garcia was born at 7:27 AM this morning. He weighs in at 8 lbs 14.8 oz and is 20 1/4" long. So yeah, big kid. Jess woke me this morning at 15 til 5 and he was born 2 hrs 42 minutes later. I'm surprised we made it to the hospital in time. I'll write more when we get home tuesday as I'm posting this from my phone.