The liner notes from the Rush Replay X3 DVD box set includes a (small) reproduction of the ’81, ’84, and ’87 tour books. 1987 was the first tour I saw. I have a copy of the tour book buried in a closet somewhere at my parents house.

Here is what Neil’s gear page looked like…. because Rush was nerdy enough to include write ups of their gear.

I had this zany idea of ripping the DVDs so I could watch them on my computer. It doesn’t seem to be working…. yet.

I swore I’d never use one of these. Well… maybe it wasn’t that dramatic, maybe I just said publicly that I prefer to have my tuner be a pedal rather than a clip on, but whatever.  Most tuner pedals double as kill switches and that is really useful.

One of the positives of being a guitar playing gear obsessed nerd is that you can usually come up with a pretty good Christmas list.  My siblings and our spouses do a secret Santa every year.  There are always plenty of gadgets that I can put on my wish list and this year I added a clip on tuner.  Today was the first time I used it.  It worked.  I’m pleased.

I wonder if Alex Lifeson ever pulled out a clip on tuner at a Rush rehearsal and if he did I wonder if Neil Peart ever made fun of him for it.  Geddy Lee probably would have.  I can totally see that happening.  I can hear Dirk and Pratt saying something like, Lerxst, you look like an idiot with that little clip on thing.  I might be projecting lines from the restaurant scene from the Beyond the Lighted Stage documentary onto this topic, partly because I am a dork.  Okay, totally because I’m a dork.

Don’t kill Pratt, it’s bad for business.

She had a watch.  I hated that fucking watch.

It’s not lyrics, it’s evidence.

Waiter (putting Alex’s appetizer onto the table): pork bellies
Alex: What did you call me?

I called her, Urgh

I mentioned the other day that I added Neil Peart’s Ghost Rider to my audible collection.  I have read it once before, years ago, but I want to listen to the audiobook on my commutes because… well… because I miss the guy.  Don’t judge me, I’m a little messed up over here.  A big part of my youth just up and died on me and I’m trying to deal with it.  Give me a break.  Sheesh.

Anyway, I needed to get through the book I was already listening to before I could start Ghost Rider.  If I stop one book before it’s finished I’ll probably never go back to it, as evidenced by the Shelby Foote book that’s been sitting in my audible collection at 20% read for something like a year now.

The book I was listening to was Sleeping Beauties by Stephen King and his son Owen King.  It was pretty good.  Not a world beater by any stretch but definitely a fun story.  All the women in the world go to sleep and won’t wake up and all the men left over lose their shit trying to deal with it.  Give it a read, it’s pretty good.

I was getting close to the end of the book.  The audio file was down to the last hour or so, maybe a touch longer.  One of the characters quotes something else and says something along the lines of everyone is just looking for a Peaceable Kingdom.

Fuck.

Rush, the album Vapor Trails, track four is called Peaceable Kingdom.

The two Misters King, without knowing and without any malice, just kicked me in the crotch.

Damn it.

Oh and Vapor Trails track three is called Ghost Rider… just like the book I have queued up next.  They even hit me with a song from the same damn album.

Sonofabitch.

Neil Peart would likely be pleased to know that I can still flub my way through Stick it Out from the Counterparts album, and Circumstances from the Hemispheres album.

He’d probably also laugh his ass off at how badly I suck, and that would be fine by me.

Given the generally shitty state that the universe has been in since Friday, I could really use a Bruins win tonight.  They just scored to go up 4-2 with 15:00 left in the second period.

It’s not just Neil Peart’s untimely passing that’s messing me up.  All three of my mother’s siblings have had health issues in the past week or so.  We’ve had two hospital stays and an escalating condition that we were really hoping wouldn’t happen.

Selfishly, the worst of all of these things is that Bellana went back to school yesterday and if scheduling works out it’s possible that I won’t see her again until May.  May!  Just as it was when she left in August, I am absolutely thrilled for her.  She’s in such an exciting situation and I am so very happy.  Selfishly, again, I am also really sad.  I still want her to come home after school, you know?  She’s only been gone for a day and I miss her.

The Bruins just upped the lead to 5-2 with 12 minutes left in the second.  They are doing their best to make me feel better.  Maybe after the game I’ll see if I can remember how to play Stick it Out.  Anything to cheer me up.

Addendum: The Bruins blew their three goal lead and ended up losing in a shootout.  Sonofabitch!

My Uncle Jim, my mother’s big brother, is having heart surgery as I write this. Please join me in sending him all the happy thoughts you can spare. I’m giving him red head vibes with both barrels. BOOM.

I posted a bunch of pictures from various Rush shows the other day.  I left out my favorites.  I’ll share them now.

9/7/12 in Manchester, NH:

6/29/15 in New York, NY:

Those are my favorites. I was only able to bring the kids to two of the 25 shows I saw. Jen was with me for 15 of them.

We started dating in April 2007. In June 2007 I introduced her to my brother and my brother in law. Want to guess where we were when the introductions happened? We were at a Rush concert in Mansfield, MA. Obviously.

After we started dating there was only one Rush show she didn’t see with me. Sadly it was one of, if not the, best shows I’d ever seen. It was the July 2007 show at Mohegan Sun.*  We were together for all of the other shows.  New York, Milwaukee, Atlantic City, all of them.  I probably told her 100 times how happy it made me that I got to share those experiences with her, and how happy it made me knowing that she joined in because she enjoyed them too rather than just going to make me happy.  A lot of the road trips we went on were her idea.  Can you even begin to imagine how much I love her for that?

Now that the kids are older they are much more appreciative not only of music in general, but of the Rock and Roll.  I would have liked to have been able to take them to one more show.  There was talk back in 2015 of maybe doing one off shows or even doing residencies somewhere.  I never really believed any of that talk, but I was still kinda hoping.  I would have loved to drag my whole family out one more time.  Now… it’s never going to happen.  That’s one of the things that makes me so sad about all of this.

*note on the link.  That post is from my old myspace blog.  I have been wanting to port all of that stuff into this page, but back dating posts in the current wordpress.com editor is a colossal pain in the dick.  It’s much easier to do it in blogger, so I created a new page there and started entering back dated posts.  I still have a couple of months worth of 2007 to go, and then all of 2008.  Once it’s all done I’ll import it in here, but I will also probably password protect it all.  I want to bring it in here for my benefit, not for anyone else’s.  For now though, you get to look at my write up of that July 2007 Mohegan Sun show.  The second to last sentence of that post is the most important one.  “The only way it could have been better was if Jen were with me.”

I don’t post here for views.  I post here because I have a small part of my brain that is a loud mouthed arrogant jerk who enjoys having a forum for yelling at the universe that almost no one alive is aware of but still runs the risk of being seen by anyone.  Imagine the old curmudgeon who yells “get off my lawn” from inside his house where no one on his lawn could ever hear him suddenly deciding to crack a window a few milometers.  That’s me, and this blog is the window.  This metaphor is awful and I don’t even know what I’m going for here.  What the hell was I going to talk about anyway?

I got a bunch of hits over the last two days.  The overwhelming majority are from the Neil Peart obituary I copied yesterday.  I don’t care about page views.  I don’t care about site visitors.  This isn’t a business, this is a repository for brain droppings.  I’m glad I could bring that article to people though.  I think back to junior high and high school when many of my friendships were based solely on Rush fandom.  In those days people gave us shit for it.  Rush was pretty much the definition of un-cool, and we were un-cool too.  Something weird has happened in the 21st century though.  Un-cool things started becoming cool.  Not me, obviously, (did you read that first paragraph?) but un-cool things I love are now the coolest things ever.  Rush got caught up in that.  Suddenly it’s cool to love Rush.  Granted, maybe not as much as I love Rush, but you get the idea.

WordPress.com gives you a little stats page and it includes the countries your hits have come from.  Usually mine are all from the US.  Actually, mine are all from two, maybe three locations within New England, but as far as wordpress is concerned they are all US.  Today I have hits from the US, Canada, Costa Rica, India, Portugal, Philippines, UK, Japan, and Australia.  All from people who wanted to read Neil Peart’s obituary.  I find that heartwarming.  You folks love Rush?  I love Rush too.  We can all be un-cool together.  I hope you’re all dealing with this well.  I am a little embarrassed by how hard this has hit me.  I wish I were tougher than I am.  I’m not though.  I am feeling like I lost an old friend.  Someone who was very important to me even though he only popped around for a short time every few years.  It boils down to two things, I think.  I feel sad and I feel old.

I’ve listened to a lot of music over the last few days.  I have some 5.1 mixes of some of their albums, even one or two on blue ray discs.  They sound amazing.  They sound perfect.  I haven’t been listening to those though.  I’ve been listening to vinyl, mostly.  It feels more real.  It feels more connected somehow, more authentic.  I don’t know.  I’ve watched some interviews, mostly older ones.  I haven’t picked up any of his books though.  I will, soon.  I had an audible credit that was burning a hole in my pocket and I used it on an audiobook copy of Ghost Rider.  That seemed like the best choice.  I’ve read it before, and once I finish the book I’ve been listening to over the past few weeks I will “read” it again.

I have so much other stuff to do.  We are hoping to take a little trip later in the year and I have to get myself physically able to go for long walks.  My back and my legs are so screwed up right now.  I just need to practice walking.  There’s a treadmill at a gym near my house that has my name on it.  I just have to get myself there.  I also have a gig in a couple of weeks and I have to practice guitar a ton to make sure I don’t disintegrate the way I did back in November.  I need to practice walking every day and I need to practice playing every day.  I need to.  I just do.  I don’t know how on Earth I am going to do it, but I need to.

I also need to keep talking through this Neil Peart stuff.  It makes me feel better, somehow.  Also, if people are going to come here maybe knowing that there’s a red haired doofus in Massachusetts who is feeling fucked up about the passing of someone he never actually met might make someone else out there feel better for a millisecond or two.  Who the hell knows.  Whatever.  I don’t care.