This post is made in the honor of a friend who saw a recent travel report and told me that I had real talent, although I really need to stop being so goshdarn negative.

Total non sequitur today.

In the early 90s, my family used to go to a July 4th party hosted by some friends of my parents. This party is possibly why I consider the Fourth of July easily the best holiday of the year - it was on a large suburban/rural plot that had horses and cool cars and crabs and burgers and tractor rides (complete with someone in a gorilla suit jumping out of the woods to scare kids).

And the fireworks. At dusk, the adults (mainly the men - the women, in what may have been the best decision of the night, stayed on the enclosed porch) would take a homemade mortar and launch fireworks off into the night (there was the one time when the organizer, whose hobby/obsession was 20th century warfare, recreated the Battle of the Bulge on a tabletop with little tanks that really fired when lit). Seeing your dad help to launch fireworks always made you feel pretty cool.

Well, anyway. There was one time right after we had returned from Taiwan that I especially remembered - I was in high school and was thus a little too old for the "kiddie stuff", but I found a few other people and we spent a fun time throwing around a frisbee. It was a nice warm summer night - I don't remember a lot of the other details, but I do remember just enjoying myself a lot.

Well, that and the car ride home. This one song came on that I had never heard before. I would get a chance to tape it from the radio a little while later. But it never got much airplay and thus disappeared.

Well, long story short - today, for no apparent reason, I got it in my head again and decided to search for it. The song is "You Don't Treat Me No Good", aka "Lover", and it's by a group called Sonia Dada (listen to a clip off the original album Hhere, or listen to a clip of a live version here).

I like the song - it's catchy, it's got a great chorus, and a great beat - all despite being a song about a guy who's leaving his girlfriend because she treats him like dirt. And it's funny that the obvious pain and sorrow - although I can see them there - never register because I so closely associated it with being a little sweaty, a little tired, and a lot happy.