Allan´s Weblog

Sitting here in a late hour fiddling about on Youtube - modern man's village well where the world gather to freshen up and share experiences.

This evening I am thinking about all the distant crushes on women I've had through time. Distant crushes in the form of women I've got to know through mass media. And thinking about it, there's a long line of those. Hey!, I said to myself - could this not develop into a new series here on Allan's Weblog?

Hell, yes it could - and it will.

I found out that I didn't have to search around more than a few minutes before I discovered - or rather rediscovered - old movie-clips, music-videos and other goodies I remember from throughout my life. Videos featuring the wild, exciting, adorable, beautiful, day-dream-generating mass-media-exposed females I've come across from my earliest teens to the present day.

At this stage, in order to launch this little project of mine chronologically, I leaned back in my chair and began thinking back. Way back. Back to the time when I was thirteen years of age and still living in my parent's house. I remembered my room on the first floor in our one-family house. My stereo set I bought with the money I earned from delivering newspapers in the neighbourhood. My big Bang and Olufsen open-reel tape recorder, which I used to record music shows from the radio. I remembered how I would listen to music alone and together with friends. I was into music indeed. It was like I'd just discovered that there was something like music present in the world - and it was not the music my parents heard.

At thirteen I was beginning to make my own way in the world - and I used rock music as the tool.

I remembered the posters hanging on the wall in my room. Posters I'd got from magazines. Posters of Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, The Sweet, Slade - that sort of stuff.

And I particularly remembered the poster which made my heart beat a bit faster. Not just because this poster was about rock and me liking the music a lot. It was also, or rather, because the woman playing the bass on the poster wore black leather, was beautifully looking, was "A Wild One" and was everything I strangely desired at the time. I had seen her on TV, too - and man she was wild.

I was thirteen, and I was daydreaming. Now, this is supposed to be a decent weblog, so I will not be all too explicit about these daydreams of mine - but I reckon they weren't much different from many other boys' daydreams then - and now.

The girl on the poster was Suzie Quatro. She wore black leather, she pumped the bass, she was wild and uncontrollable and I was in love.

In the following video, which I remember having seen on the telly back then, her song rang a million bells in me. She was singing it to me - personally. At least that was what I imagined.

Go on in order to watch her perform, and maybe also think back to the time of your first mass-media crush.

Read more...

Let me describe a situation from a late afternoon last week.

On my way from my job, I was doing some daily shopping in a supermarket not far from where I live. You know what it's like in a market like that - it's some sort of reversed communist way of doing the shopping. I mean, in the East Block before, say 1990, you'd have to stand in a line in order to get your hands on ordinary stuff. Today, in our capitalist societies, we'll have to stand in a line to pay for it.

Well, that's the way it is. We want to live in cities, and city life means standing and driving in lines.


In that particular supermarket, there were 6 lines of which 4 were open at 3:30pm. In each of the 4 lines, there were approximately 10 people queuing up - and you could feel the vibrations in the place going bad. I stood there in my line waiting, sensing how some - too many - of the people in the place were slowly but steadily transforming into a ticking bomb.

Seems to me that 10 people in a line is about the amount of people a crowd can endure. As it sometimes happens, somebody in the back of one of the lines began shouting at the fast-working girls trying to serve the many people as well as they possibly could.

"Why don't you morons open more lines?" the guy in a suit and cellphone shouted. A lady somewhere seconded the suggestion by loudly saying: "They are probably sitting somewhere in a canteen sipping coffee all of them. It's not possible to make people work these days, now is it?"

Bad vibes. I say, really bad vibes.

The poor supermarket girls lowered their heads trying to work harder than humanly possible, everybody else were either mad or embarrassed.

I felt embarrassed. What in the world were these costumers thinking of? I mean, nobody can be that busy. Maybe we were all a bit bored with the situation, but there would be a multitude of things to do about it. I think the way these people reacted would probably be the worst of all the choices.

Bad vibrations tend to spread. Just as good vibrations do.

Why didn't we all start talking to each other? I mean, 8 minutes of waiting could have been transformed into something beneficial to us all. I could have asked the lady behind me, if she had a nice day today. I could have said that I couldn't help noticing that she'd bought a bottle of goats milk - and that I was wondering in what kind of recipe she would use just that unusual product.

I am sure we would have a conversation going immediately. I could tell her that I am currently reading a book, which made me think of this or that. Or she would have told me of one of her grandchildren who had just learned how to write his own name.

Maybe our conversation would have started a chain-reaction. Others might either start listening - or talking to somebody just like we did. In a minute, the waiting-time would have been minimized significantly. Not if you stood looking at your wristwatch - but that's just the point. Let's do anything but looking at watches in situations like that. Let's talk to each other. Then waiting in a line in the supermarket just might become one of the best situations experienced that day.

Next time I find myself waiting in a line, I will do just that. It's my responsibility.