Daily Archives: May 23, 2007

89. Document everything that you do

Music, Song Blog,

As mentioned several posts ago, I first heard about Dan Bern on NPR May 23, 1997. Ten years later I have been to close to 30 of his shows and own countless recordings, both studio and bootleg.

Of his hundreds of songs it is hard to pick a favorite, but I’m pretty sure I like Run Away the best. I like the tune and the words. I may have heard him sing it live once, but it’s possible I never have – and probably never will.

I was going to write him a note and request it at the last show – after all it was close to our ten year anniversary. But He wouldn’t have played it, I’m sure of that – he played more of a Dan Bern greatest hits kind of show.

Without further ado, here’s Run Away. If you’d rather see & hear him play it, YouTube has a version (uploaded by fellow Dan Bern fan, Luther) – but the sounds of the guitar are too loud for my ears in that version.

He said document everything that you do

Mark it so your children will know it too
But it’s harder, when you’ve outstayed your welcome
It’s hard to do

One time Johnny tried LSD
Had a great revelation, but he
Found he couldn’t put it into words
So he started drawing pictures of birds
With ten eyes
Men with 50 arms

I wanna run run away run away run away (3x)
From here

In the afternoon my Dad would draw the blinds
Sleep till I woke him up with my mind
I was only 3 or 4 years old
I lost that power long ago

Ridin’ through the rain on a motor bike
Babe Ruth lookin at a called third strike
Charles Manson working at the fair
Lettin all the little kids pull his hair

I wanna run run away run away run away (3x)
From here

Let me go and I will tell you stories all my life
If you don’t catch up I’ll make it up to you in the next life, I promise you

I live on the margin, I live on the side
Don’t sit with the bride groom, or the bride
I sit with the engineer
Who takes me fishing on the edge of the pier

I’ve come to believe we made up time
Like we made up rhythm and made up rhyme
But it don’t bug me, it’s OK
Livin in endless Saturday

I wanna run run away run away run away (3x)
From here….

Changes

Technology

Despite the issues I encountered with my mom’s Comcast installation at Christmastime, I made the decision to move our service from RCN to Comcast. We’ve been happy enough with RCN except for their price hikes. We signed up with them a couple of years ago at a reasonable price. When our year of cheaper prices was up they also implemented a Digital Vision tier that we had to get because we had an HD converter box – so instead of just having to pay about $7 more for the HD converter, we had to pay $27 a month for it.

We’ve wanted a DVR for a while (and even tried to install a DVD recorder ourselves – with no success) so I called RCN to find out how much more a month the DVR service would be. They wanted nearly $20 more a month for that.

I tried to compare prices online and couldn’t so called Comcast to see what they could do. With their service we now will have an extra converter box, a DVR, HBO in addition to Showtime & Starz (the best of the movie channels) and online management of our voice mail (something I’ve been wanting for a while). All this for about the same, or less than we were getting with RCN. Of course it is a special offer – only good for a year or two, but still – we will be saving a little. By the time they’re ready to charge us more we can move to FiOs or something else.