THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

(Well, this is nothing if not timely.) Some albums I may have forgotten to shout out are below. As always, I'm sure there are more, but the following got me all twisted: TV On The Radio - Nine Types Of Light; PJ Harvey - Let England Shake; Wilco - The Whole Love; St. Vincent - Strange Mercy; Kate Bush - 50 Words For Snow; Iron & Wine - Kiss Each Other Clean; Zombi - Escape Velocity; Arctic Monkeys - Suck It And See; Jamie Woon - Mirrorwriting Some movies I saw in '11 that I really enjoyed (and I know I left some out, but whatevs): Drive; Melancholia; Hugo; Take Shelter; Meek's Cutoff; Warrior; Jane Eyre; The Skin I Live In; Bridesmaids; Super 8; Martha Marcy May Marlene; Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; Project Nim; The Artist; Attack The Block; Cave Of Forgotten Dreams; Contagion A few wonderful '11 books: Ready Player One (Ernest Cline); Love Goes To Buildings On Fire (Will Hermes); Robopocalypse (Daniel Wilson); The Last Holiday (Gil Scott-Heron) And a fin...

The Oprah-tization of existence means that your life is now a Story, complete with Chapters and Themes and Movements and the like. (And sometimes, when the Story is more compelling than the person, people believe in the Story so much that the person is swept along in the tide of transformation and [re]creation, such as the differences between Erick and "MrH8," but that's for another post.) So if that axiom holds true, my time at Evergreen Park Grocery – from a fourteen-year-old bottle bitch and gas pump monkey to a twenty-one-year-old counter jockey and do-everything – represents a fun and exciting set of chapters, tracking teenage crushes and midnight basketball and blood and sweat and mullets and cut-off t-shirts and tanning and high fructose corn syrup and gelled hair and grief and loss and ice cream and laughter and more. Did I mention the laughter? Lots and lots of laughter. So much laughter that I wrongly imagined all jobs to be this joyful, even if you did ha...