You try, try to post something with some kind of unifying theme, but then end up putting down a bunch of disjointed ideas

I need some kind of indie rock intervention.  I just bought five Billy Joel (Billy Joel!) songs from iTunes, from the An Innocent Man album.  The kids among my readers will find it risible that I actually paid for music at all online, but, putting that aside, my selection should be enough cause for concern standing alone.  Maybe it’s the perfect weather in New York the last two days (which, ironically, have been among the most stressful at work for a few weeks) that has put me in such an unaccountably good mood as to become especially prone to reckless cultural choices like this one.  I did allow myself the thought that the lameness of what I was doing was mitigated by the decision to buy these tracks not off of some Greatest Hits compilation — which is just for the lazy and uninformed — but rather from the original album grouping.  Oh, the lies you’ll tell yourself.  

But these are really good songs, right?  I mean, “For the Longest Time”?  ”Leave a Tender Moment Alone” “Uptown Girl“? This album was critical to my 7th- and 8th-grade Catholic grade school puppy love awakenings.  I know I rewound the cassette in my dad’s car to play “Tell Her About It” over and over, to build up the courage to call Jessica H_____. and ask her to go on a date to a movie at the mall (When I finally did, she got back to me the next day and said she couldn’t go that weekend, because she had to babysit one day, but she “wasn’t sure yet if it was on Friday or Saturday.”  Bullshit, Jessica — I saw right through that, even through the haze my infatuation, and I’m calling you out on it.  But it’s ok–we’re cool).  Plus I think my mom had the original record, and played it even earlier.  I can picture her (whether a genuine memory or fabrication I’m not sure) singing along to “Uptown Girl” in the car, tossing her hair back and forth in the wind, childlike and carefree.  At the same time, I really am worried about what this signals.  Two years ago I felt like I was at least right behind the crest when it came to which indie bands were coming out, and thought I could do a decently respectable job during most rounds of Hipster Band-Reference-Jerk-Off.  I hated Billy Joel then - he was the worst kind of sappy, maudlin, suburban wreck of a singer-songwriter that I couldn’t even bring myself to pretend at an “ironic” appreciation for.  And yet tonight I just bought him another gin and tonic. You know those farewell parties that terminally ill people have so that everyone who’d theoretically show up at the funeral gets a chance to say goodbye to the living person instead? That’s what my 29th birthday party is going to be this year, guys.  I’m buying fucking Billy Joel music now — clearly I’ve only got one year left, before I recede into the permanence of the banal.             

Relatedly, I found this headline on the wire service sidebar of nytimes.com today very funny:

ARTS   | May 7, 2008 
At 63, Rod Stewart Not Ready to Slow Down 
By REUTERS 
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Hall of Fame rocker Rod Stewart is 63 years-old, but nowhere near retirement as he considers a wish list of future projects that include a movie, an R&B album, and maybe even a fling with country and western music. 

I love the faux-suspense of whether Rod Stewart will be daring enough to follow through and try that fling with country and western music.  How could Rod Stewart’s thought process possibly involve any kind of undulating self-examination or restraint at this point?  It’s more like “Fuck it, I’m 63.  I’m just going to order the dessert and enjoy myself.”   

At my job I am able to work out on my lunch hour and so, since the weather has broken, I’ve been using the time to run outside.  Today I ran back and forth across the Brooklyn Bridge. Have any of you who live here not done this yet on a sunny day?  It’s transcendently lovely.  I left my fresh change of clothes in a locker at the New York Sports Club on Water Street, which I must say is a bit more well-kept than the one on Wall Street I usually frequent. (That sounds douchey, but I do not work in finance; that’s just where my office happens to be.)  Except that at the Water Street gym, they play house music throughout the whole place, including the locker room.  Maybe I’m sort of uninitiated into the overall Manhattan men’s locker room culture, but I thought it was profoundly weird to be listening to a remix of “Work it” by RuPaul while a bunch of naked, hairy older men surround me.  It’s already protocol not to look around any more than you have to, but that mandate was strengthened today by a terrible fear that if I did look up for more than three seconds my brain would match the visual to the soundtrack and detect some kind of synchronized pattern in the movements of the middle-aged bond traders and senior managers in there with me, all dangling their bits and hair-dryering their balls.  And also at Water Street the towel/attendant guy was really chatty, whereas at Wall Street they regard all the patrons with silent contempt, which I think is just right.