I first saw Ratdog in 1996.

It wasn’t because I was a fan, hell I had no idea who they were.

My buddy told me that we just had to go to Further Festival and who was I to argue. I was 24 years old and an all day hippie festival at the Virginia Beach Amphitheatre in June sounded ideal to me. To be real honest, I wasn’t that interested in the music. The only names in the line up I recognized were Bruce Hornsby and Los Lobos. I only new Los Lobos for their cover of La Bamba and Bruce Hornsby was a little bit ‘Adult Contemporary’ for my taste. I’d never heard of the Headliners, billed as the Ratdog Revue. I was going for the party. A bunch of hippies, outcasts and potheads converging to take the concert experience “Further” in the tradition of Ken Kesey. You know, the guy with Electric Kool Aid Acid Tests.

A few days before the concert, some one tipped me off that Ratdog was the name of the band fronted by Bob Wier and Rob Wasserman. Now Bob Wier I had heard of, the great rhythm guitar player of the Grateful Dead.

Six years earlier, I was in college. My roommate freshman year, Matt, was a true Deadhead. He had concert tapes for dozens of shows. I was familiar with the Dead, of course, Truckin’, Casey Jones, and Sugar Magnolias. But Matt’s tapes contained another dimension of the band that I had never heard before. Extended improv jams in songs like Fire on the Mountain and Eyes of the World. Matt would tell me all kinds of things about the band, perhaps he was trying to convert me. And I heard a lot of Grateful Dead music that year.

I had several opportunities to go see the Dead in the early 90’s, but I never did. I guess I kind of assumed that I would catch them on the next go around of the tour that seemed to never end. But when Jerry Garcia died in 1995, the Grateful Dead dissolved and I would never be able to see them live. I still regret that.

But in 1996,I was going to have the chance to see Bob Wier. I was excited, if I would never see the Dead, this would be the next best thing.

The festival was great. I had a wonderful time. And considering the amount of drugs and alcohol flowing, the people were incredibly laid back. No pushing and shoving, no rudeness, everyone seemed to be happy to be there and happy to be with each other. The music was pretty good too, especially Ratdog.

We had no idea what to expect from them, would it just be the Dead minus Jerry, or would they avoid grateful Dead songs altogether?

They opened with three good old Mississippi Delta Blues songs; Good Morning Little Schoolgirl, Howling and Wang Dang Doodle. Then they played the Dylan classic, Maggie’s Farm. As the music played my mind wandered back to my freshman dorm of all of those songs on Matt’s tapes the one I liked the best was Looks Like Rain. I loved the way Bobby and Donna sang and forth to each other at the end of the song. After Maggie’s Farm, Bruce Hornsby came back on stage and sat at the piano. I can’t express in writing the surge of joy I felt when I heard the opening chords to Looks Like Rain. I got up and danced. And for the rest of the night and continued to just feel the music and dance with it.

The band continued into a smoking version of rhythm and blues classic, Juke. Next a Bob Wier tune, The Winners and then into a nice Easy to Slip/ Supplication jam. A bass solo, featuring the Star Spangled Banner, set up Turn on Your Lovelight to round out the set. For an encore Bob and Rob came back out with Hornsby and Mickey Hart (and probably some others, but I’m not sure) and played Wilson Pickett’s In the Midnight Hour, Dylan’s immortal All Along the Watchtower and Buddy Holly’s Not Fade Away.

A few weeks later, I went to a Smashing Pumpkins concert. The crowd was rude and there was plenty pushing and shoving. Billy Corgan stopped playing in the middle of one of their most popular songs and threw a temp tantrum cause some one from the audience had manged to throw a glow stick up on the stage. The whole thing just left a bad taste in my mouth. I swore off concerts, figuring that perhaps I had simply got too old for them.

I didn’t even consider seeing a concert for over ten years.

Yes, one of those days.

You know the ones? The kind where nothing really goes right. Nothing goes very wrong, but nothing really goes right. I shouldn’t even complain, there are a lot of people in the world who have it so much worse than me. But I can’t help it… today everything just seemed to be conspiring against me.

Where to start…

Work? Oh yeah, work is great. Well, not great, but actually shitty. Why? It’s hard to put it in words really, its more of a feel than anything in particular. For example, today we had our one of twice weekly project meetings. We got through the agenda, my boss said that we were done. I packed up my shit and went to my desk, cause I had shit to take care of. After a while, it dawned on me that the other Network Engineers were still in the conference room. My boss had left, I had left but they were still in there. They remained in there for about 45 minutes.

I don’t know what they talked about. What I do know is that what ever it was, they didn’t feel the need to consult or ask me about it. Nor did they feel the need to update me on what ever it was.

Wow. Don’t I feel like an important and integral part of my ‘team?’ No I don’t. Not even a little bit.

My made up club, the shitty blogs club’s domain name seems to be parked at godaddy. The fact of the matter is The domain name and hosting were gifted to me. Same thing for shitty blog radio. I think the SBC domain name expired. The SBR one will be next. It was bound to happen sooner or later. I’m not 100% sure why it happened, but I’m fairly certain that there is more than a reasonable explanation for it. Hell, I can’t complain about that part at all.

The problem is, since it I didn’t register it, I can’t renew it. Whois shows it as expired, but none of the registration places will let me purchase it. Is this because of a bit of lag in the whole registration thing, or did some one else buy it? I don’t know. I am powerless to do much about it. I could register .net domains, but I’m not sure if it is worth it.

The bigger issue will be when shittyblogradio.com goes… I can register the domain, but I can’t afford to replace the level of hosting I’ve been enjoying. I’m not sure what I am going to do about that either.

At the gym, I was just stiff enough to stop me from running well.

My car was in for regular maintenance, so I couldn’t drive home for lunch. So I skipped it.

So on and so forth.

Just one of those days.