Friday, August 19, 2011

I Hate Talk Radio...

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm a gloutton for the news. I read stories on various online news sources, watch ABC World News Tonight and Inside Edition, and almost always glance at the paper. I want to know what is up in my community, and the world surrounding it. And it's even worse than usual, during election time.

However, I don't want to listen to news on my fucking car radio, when I'm driving. Talk radio is the most boring thing ever, and is probably the number one cause of trucking accidents - because it puts people to sleep, when they should be focused on the road.

Also, today, it just ruined something that's been a dear part of my life for as long as I can remember: 96.5 WHTQ, the local classic rock station. I've enjoyed that station, at least since kindergarten or first grade - all the way up to yesterday. When I'm driving, I need some music - and I don't have a CD player in my car, nor can I obtain recent or even older music on cassette anymore. I need rock and roll radio!

Yes, we still have 101.1 WJRR - but what about when that goes to a commercial break? I'm not always in the mood for hip-hop and top 40 - and I'm just about never in the mood for country! Yeah! Why couldn't they replace a country or a hip-hop station with this babble?

It's just another reminder of how my community is changing, and in some ways for the worse. I mean, NASA discontinued the space shuttle. And, my grandfather passed away last month. What's next? Those wackos may actually be right about their bullshit about what might happen on December 21st of next year?!!?

I have enough things to be upset about in life, and talk radio will only enrage me even more. Bring back the rock and roll, damn it!

Monday, August 1, 2011

One More Year 'Til 30!

Yes, it's true. I'm twenty-fucking-nine, today...

And what does this mean?

I'm trying to figure that one out. I already outlived Robert Johnson, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Mia Zappata, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse by two years. Hell, I outlived Nick Drake by three years, 2Pac by four years, and both Cliff Burton and The Notorious B.I.G. by five years.

I will at least be in my thirties, before I have a wife and kids. Then again, Al Pacino is approaching seventy - and has never been married. Happy as a fucking clam, like that chick once said in He's Just Not That Into You. I do want to pursue a relationship with a woman, though, and if it leads to marriage...cool.

"Life is Not a Race" - a song by 311, on their 1999 album Soundsystem - has recently helped me realize that the truth is just that. Life isn't a race. People live at their own pace. I need to stop worrying about the absurd concept of "getting a wife and kids on time," and return to living. Not just merely being a soul within a body that contains operating organs - but fucking living, man.

One thing I'm planning on, though, is to be as productive as possible at twenty-nine. I mean, twenty-eight sucked - with my most recent ex-girlfriend shoving it in my nose about how much she "loves" her current boyfriend, my longtime crush suddenly deciding that she doesn't want to talk to me anymore and then asking her boss to ban me from the coffee shop she used to work at, lame country music still being popular for some reason I fail to identify, and the worst of all: my grandfather passing away, just three days shy of his eighty-second birthday.

But, while I can't promise that I won't ever be bitter about anything again, I'm going to try to at least quit being so fucking Mundchausen's-y about it.

YEAH, WHAT!

Friday, July 29, 2011

There Will Be Water

Well, guys, this is still a new blog for me. It's my second entry now.

In case anyone reads this who doesn't know me, I used to love going swimming every time the opportunity presented itself.

I lived in a trailer park called Sunrise Village - which is in Cocoa, just fifteen to twenty minutes away from where I live - until I was ten. Anyways, they had a community playground and swimming pool within the trailer park. I used to walk over there, just about every single day - with my older brother Joe, younger brother Pat, and younger sister Sarah - and go swimming. Even though I was a little kid, I used to chat with some of the older kids there too - which was a part of how I got into heavy metal music, because many of them were into it.

But, in March of 1993, my family and I moved to Ridge Manor Estates, here in Merritt Island. We had our own pool now, but our swimming was limited - as our folks still didn't trust us to swim unsupervised. Eventually, when I became a teenager, my folks gave us a little bit more leeway.

However, by that time, I began to lose interest in swimming. I'd either stay in my room and listen to music, read, or write in my journal - and my interest in writing grew. Of course, us aspiring writers rely on our life experiences for inspiration. In the last few years, I've been in a writing rut, because I've been staying in - except for when I'm at work, or on those Saturday nights when I go to Spanky's Pub for karaoke.

So much has happened this summer, and it's inspired me to want to expand my horizons again. And today, for the first time in God knows how many years, I went out into the back porch, and into the pool, and went swimming for about an hour. It was literally a breath of fresh air!

And, who knows? Maybe this will inspire me to take it even further, and go to the beach too - for the first time in what seems like an eternity. Maybe then, I'll have a little bit of color, my hair will start thickening again, and perhaps I'll even meet my soulmate there.

Yeah, I'm going hardcore now, with wandering away from my recent routine. I'll be twenty-nine years old on Tuesday, and I want to make the best of things in the one year I have left before turning thirty.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

The Pilot is Dead...

Just kidding. This isn't a sitcom, but it is my first post on this blog, and that sounded like a fucking rad title. Am I right?

With the drama surrounding the national debt ceiling going on in Washington, it's kind of hard to enjoy life. Right? Wrong!

A basic orientation about who I am, and what I'm going to talk about on this blog...

My name is Mark Furru. I am twenty-eight years old, but will be twenty-nine this coming Tuesday. I graduated from the University of Central Florida in 2008, with a B.A. in psychology. I'm an aspiring writer, who is interested in politics, professional sports, literature, current events, and the cinema. My number-one interest, however, is music.

I listen to all kinds of music - albeit I'm not very much into teeny bopper pop or the middle-aged pop stars with southern drawls and cowboys hats that only claim to be country singers - but I've been a huge fan of heavy metal music for the better part of my life, thus far. Sometimes, I might stray from that - and listen to alternative, indie, classic rock, oldies, old-school outlaw country, hip-hop, reggae, techno, electronica, classical, jazz, whatever - but I love to mix it up. That's why I call myself the Heavy Metal Hipster.

I'll be honest, as I type this, I'm listening to "Goodnight Tonight" by Paul McCartney & Wings. It ain't necessarily metal, but the dude was a fucking Beatle, and some mean guitar is played during the song's instrumental break. In a nutshell, it rules.

During the week, I tend to punch-in, work, punch-out, come home, and chill out like J.D. Sallinger. During the weekends, I tend to raise a little bit of karaoke hell with my droogs at Spanky's Pub - right here in beautiful Merritt Island, Florida.

I will warn everybody about one thing, though. I have opinions on just about everything that I know at least one little iota about. So don't come up and deck me, if you get offended by whatever I say. After all, this is America - the land of the beautiful, the land of the free, the land of the soon-to-be-former President Barack Obama (T-minus one year, five months, three weeks, and two days left until we inaugurate the next individual) - and we have our First Amendment rights. I'd say the odds are slim-to-none, of my words inciting a riot. And I won't delete anyone's feedback - even if it insults me - because y'all have that same Constitutional right!

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