Starting the 2012 Clock: Days Without Incident

Ever since an early 70s New Year's Eve parked in the living room of friends of my parents, wishing they'd just left me and my sisters home instead of making us go to these weird people's house and hang around with their weird kids while the grown-ups all laughed too loud about inane things like the eggplant, leaving us to be bored silly by the only thing their tiny black-and-white television was capable of receiving -- an interminable Grateful Dead show live at Winterland -- ever since then the very name of that band has filled me with utter loathing. I know, I know, tons of people LOVE them, follow them, mark the passage of time in their own lives by them, but me? Like I said, fierce loathing.

That damn show was 4 hours long. And I think we were there for the entire thing, waiting, waiting for our parents to be done with their reveling so we could go home to our little beds and sleep. Why we hadn't brought any books with us is beyond me.

Really, I just don't get the whole thing. And all this time, forty years now, I've been waiting for the whole thing to blow over, for the Grateful Dead to be done. I know that might totally bum some people out, people who are my friends and who are also fans, but here is where I get to be completely honest about things. And dude, if I never had to see another tie-dyed image of Jer Bear, that would be just fine by me.

You all can like whatever you want. And I can not like what I don't.

But the thing is that it isn't blowing over. I keep thinking surely, with every successive generation, the bizarre hold this phenomenon has on people will simply fade. But I'm wrong. And I've realized that one of the ways in which this god-damn thing is perpetuated, especially where I live, in Marin County (which I love but which sometimes just chaps my hide), is by Boomers in the media. That's right: I hold the liberal media responsible.

I am telling you that few days go by over here in this pastoral paradise I inhabit when there isn't a "news" story in the local paper that references the gd GD or one of its members. I've threatened for years to keep track, but always been too distracted by other things.

Until now. Starting today I am keeping track. How many days can the Marin IJ go without referencing the gd GD under the guise of "news?" How many consecutive Days Without Incident can they achieve?

The tipping point for me was the BREAKING NEWS announcement sent out earlier today that one of the members of the gd GD is turning a local waterfront restaurant into a music venue. How this manages to be breaking news is NEWS indeed to me, but that's a whole other rant for a whole other post and a whole other tracking project.

To be fair and to start at the beginning, I went back and checked the Marin IJ for January 1 - 3, 2012, and there were no gd GD references that I could find. 


But that run is over already today, with the announcement about Terrapin and Seafood Peddler, as above.

Days Without Incident: 3 0

Some people don't think it'll be possible for the local paper to get past TWO Days Without Incident. I am thinking more like 5, but fully acknowledge that the timing of starting this is not the most generous -- since now there's bound to be endless "news" about this music venue in the paper, interviews by local "rock" columnists, etc.

Wow, I'm so bitter!

But really, I'm not. I'm mostly really and truly stunned that this is all still happening, that in 2012 we are still hearing about these guys, that young people are still liking this. Yeah, you might say, but you don't feel that way about the Rolling Stones or the Beatles or Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin. And you're right. I don't. Because they don't suck.

Please join me in tracking this. I will be looking at the paper every night when I get home from work and posting the results in the handy little tool I'm adding to my sidebar. I want to be optimistic and think we'll manage 10 days without the gd GD, but I'm setting optimism aside and letting science do the work.

Bring it, IJ. I'm counting.