shhh, peaceful

—Warren Zevon, “Play It All Night Long,” Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School (1980)

I’ve been listening to this song a lot lately because last weekend, even though I followed that rule about how you should only eat shellfish during months with the letter “r” in them (is that even a real rule?), I got food poisoning from eating mussels at a dingy Irish pub and shit got ugly, etc. But anyhow, I managed to drag my shivering carcass out to the Drive-By Truckers show at the 9:30 club and got to enjoy the big revelation that this band’s entire fan base consists of bros from Virginia.

Like, bros embracing and tenderly belting lyrics into each other’s happy faces. Bros on a vulnerability kick. Plaid American Eagle shirts as far as the eye could see. Maybe this was known by everyone, that Nova bros adore this band. I didn’t know. And not that I care, but this has been one of my favorite bands since forever, and I’ve never thought of myself as a bro, but who really everknows the depths of hidden bro that lurk within? Point is, there were identity crises going on in between bouts of wondering if I’d ever eat solids again.

But so I was sitting down, unable to stand, thinking of this spoon theory of disease essay that a girl with Lyme disease had once made me read on our first date (like, she sat there and watched while I scrolled through it on her laptop), and figuring that I’d used up all my allotted spoons thanks to food poisoning, and then Patterson Hood started playing this Warren Zevon song, and obviously on one level it fits—Hood more or less feels about Lynyrd Skynyrd the way Faulkner felt about Colonel John Sartoris—but I was watching this thirtysomething fan in front of me wearing a tie-dye T-shirt tucked into his belt-less jeans and he was banging out power chords on his air guitar, in this soft meditative trance, and there’s a line in the song that goes “Grandpa pissed his pants again / He don’t give a damn,” and you know? That summed it up.

—Belly, “Super-Connected,” King (1995)

Underrated album! Also, I was searching through Google Reader trying to see if any other blogs I follow had posted about Belly and came across this Smithsonian Magazine post about dinosaur researchers trying to puzzle out how, exactly, Stegosauruses ever managed to bone:

Figuring out how Stegosaurus even could have mated is a prickly subject. Females were just as well-armored as males, and it is unlikely that males mounted the females from the back. A different technique was necessary. Perhaps they angled so that they faced belly to belly, some have guessed, or maybe, as suggested by Timothy Isles in a recent paper, males faced away from standing females and backed up (a rather tricky maneuver!). The simplest technique yet proposed is that the female lay down on her side and the male approached standing up, thereby avoiding all those plates and spikes.