I’m reading disappointing reviews of tomorrow’s release of the new New Pornographers album, Challengers, and it’s bumming me out but I don’t care I’m still buying it and I’m going to love it.

Yesterday (Sunday) I had to work again before going to a fantasy football draft, which I’m going in blind this year because I now completely understand that it’s 95% luck, whereas before I foolishly thought it was only about 80% luck. No, an actual not figurative monkey couldn’t do it, but pretty close, you get the idea. Deep Blue could draft his (her?) team and still have as good a chance as the rest of us. Or maybe that computer that tried to predict the location of the next golden ticket. But that computer kept the information to itself, didn’t it?

I had to work again cuz that’s what happens this time of year. I worked Saturday as well, managing tapes and pressing play, record, fast forward, rewind, etc during preseason game #2 for the Dallas Cowboys, broadcasting out to 10 spanish markets. (There’s an english broadcast as well, of course, referred to as ‘general market’ by the spanish guys). For the past three years I have performed this task for 3 games a year, then I don’t ever do it again, then comes time to do it again a year later and the other people I work with do this every weekend and expect me to know how to route signals to and from each tape deck and where’s my headset and I’m sorry how do I hear you and talk to you and you want me to record what now? How do I do that again? I figure it out in about ten minutes and then I’m fine, but every remote truck is different and next week I get to learn a new one and experience another ten minutes of strangers’ quiet frustration as I learns alls the buttons.

So I went into work on Sunday, did I mention I worked 15 hours on Thursday and Friday? And the Wednesday before I had a meltdown and screamed at my boss? Yeah that happened and then I worked some more and now we’re all good (?)

Finally work was done for the day and I could go to my dumb fake statistics draft. I went to buy some beer once Cowboys Roundup brought to you by Pepsi had finished copying to tape. The draft started at 4:30 and already it was 5 and I had to call my first two picks in (which is kinda cool even though there are actual commercials on television mocking this practice) but I still wanted to get some beer, even though I don’t drink beer THAT often, when I do I want it to be good.

I’ve had enough beers in my life that I can tell the difference. I had not eaten anything yet that day. Indeed, today it is already 4:27 and all I’ve had is a blueberry muffin at noonish. I selected Sam Adams Lite, partially from the fact that it is my good friend Brian Johnson’s favorite beer. I believe this is because he lived in Boston and seems to think it is a Boston beer because that’s what they cleverly advertise. Whatever I picked it, went to the register (which was open and nobody in line), knew the lady was going to card me, got my license out, turned around, scanned the candies, sure enough she asked for ID, I pulled it out, dropped it on the conveyer belt, turned around, selected Kit Kat just as the lady exhaled ‘Oh NO!’. When I turned around again my ID was gone. Sucked into Lane Nine’s nethers.

Then the phone rang and my next pick was up as the lady frantically tried to pull out the conveyer belt drop mat as she apologized profusely. I scanned my draft cheat sheet, which I had wisely brought into the store with me like a total douchebag, and selected Andre Johnson, WR from Houston with my fourth pick. They couldn’t get the card. It wasn’t in the drop mat, it had avoided the drop mat, probably because it saw convincing evidence that the drop mat had never been cleaned. The lady didn’t know what to do and had called several different superiors over to Lane Nine that were also trying to get the card out. However it didn’t occur to her to turn off Lane Nine’s ‘available’ light, so now there was a very large impatient line forming. So she started scanning everybody’s goods, apologizing profusely to me again as I ate my kit kat. This went on for maybe ten minutes. I was called again and picked Reggie Brown, which was an awful selection. I thought about opening a beer but remembered that it was probably against the law, and furthermore I wouldn’t be able to prove to a law officer that I was of age to purchase and consume alcohol, be it public or not.

They finally got the license, after turning off Lane Nine’s light and blocking her entrance with stacks of magazines telling people that Britney told her kids they were mistakes, then procuring the key to the nethers that produced my ID.

I left, drafted the rest of my crappy let’s-hope-for-the-best-maybe-I’ll-get-lucky team, ate some dominos pizza, drank some beer and made fun of other peoples’ just as crappy teams while listening to THE EDGE or whatever crappy alternative music station we listened to all night. I haven’t listened to the radio in a long time. I made fun of a lot of stuff over the course of the evening…until the announcer said he was going to play a single from ‘The New Pornographers’, who have a new album coming out this week, here it is, enjoy…

So that shut me up.

The New Pornographers: Myriad Harbour [MP3]