Human beings are planners. What makes us better than animals is our ability to reason. That is, we think things through, we consider what would make us happy. We are able to conceptualize about what happiness is at all.

It is for exactly this reason that when an idiot in my Journalism class says, “dude, live every day as if it could be your last,” I cringe on the inside. What a stupid idea. What he doesn’t realize is that when he uses that tired and heroicly idiotic cliche, he’s really saying, “throw reason out the window, and shoot for immediate gratification. Don’t worry if that flies in the face of a million years of evolution. I’m 22 years old and have my own philosophy.” Jackass.

“But wait!” I hear you say. “Shouldn’t we try to live life to the fullest? Why is that guy a jackass, you jackass?”

A million years ago, we were living naked in caves. One day, a Neanderthal with a slightly larger brain came up with a plan¹. Next thing we know, he’s wearing animal skins to keep out the cold, has a handful of stone and bone tools, and is making life better for him and his tribe.

We humans do things a little different. We go to college and get an education with the plan of using said education to earn more money, buy better stuff, and make sure our kids have the best lives they can. We also save money toward retirement. We plan.

Now, what if I did what my idiot classmate proposes? I would spend every day drinking myself into a a torpor and skydiving. What if everybody subscribed to his philosophy? There would be no whiskey. There would be nobody to fly airplanes we could jump out of. There may not even be any airplanes to jump out of while they were pilotless on the ground.

We plan. We cannot live in the moment. It’s a stupid sentiment, and it should be laid to rest.

But I’ve got something better.

Henry Rollins wrote some lyrics:

no such thing as spare time

no such thing as free time

no such thing as down time

all you got is life time.

I agree with Henry on this one. And I think the lesson is simple: we planning, thinking, scheming, reasoning humans don’t have any extra time. Spare time? Time to waste? Never. The only time we have is life time. That is, our lives are only so long. Each of us has only so much time to live on Earth, and after that, we’re done. No encore. So time to waste? Time to kill? No, the lesson is this: we cannot live as if every day could be our last, but we can live as if we don’t have a second to spare. Make every moment count, because you’ll never get those moments back.

This makes waiting in line at the DMV almost intolerable.

While I wrote the following for my Music Appreciation: The History of Rock N’ Roll class, I think it belongs on my funny little website, too.

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I have never been a Beatles fan. I’ve enjoyed most of the Beatles covers I’ve heard, but it’s been rare that I’ve heard an actual Beatles song, performed by the actual Beatles, that I’ve thought was great.

Some Beatles songs have actually turned me off quite a bit: “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road” “Revolution 9,” and “Yellow Submarine,” among them. Which is kind of weird, upon reflection, since I enjoy overly simplistic songs by the Misfits and the Ramones.

I always sort of avoided the Beatles, preferring to listen to bands like Black Sabbath, and the bands inspired by Black Sabbath. It’s been easy to ignore the fact that Black Sabbath were themselves hugely inspired by the Beatles. Ozzy Osbourne even said, “The biggest break in my life came when The Beatles hit. They totally sucked me in and I thought, ‘That’s my way out, my music.’”

Well, having context for the Beatles has made all the difference. For years, my little brother has been trying to get me to listen to, “Abby Road,” with an open mind, but with zero success. Not even that time we enjoyed half a bottle of whiskey while our girlfriends were out of town.

Music goes through trends. It evolves. Bands themselves evolve. Early Judas Priest, for instance, sounds almost nothing like their more recent albums. Priest’s early albums sound dated. It sounds like it came from the early 1980s. The Beatles are not exempt from this phenomena. Their music has a certain 1960s hippy-dippy quality to it, in the same way Judas Priest has that kind of 1980s tight-pants, big sneakers sound. But it would be extremely unfair to either band to say that they were just a hippy-dippy ‘60s band or just a big hair ‘80s band. Both bands were obviously children of their generation and had that sound, but both were so very much more.

It’s my ability to see that the Beatles were so much more than just a ‘60s band that’s amazing. Up till now, I’d discounted them as,  “that garbage my folks listened to, and we all know how much sense they have.”

And so, after all these years, all the self-education that landed me with a huge library of music all the way back to Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, and Alice Cooper, I finally got a Beatles album. Since my brother’s been saying it for years, I decided to requested, “Abby Road,” from the San Luis Obispo library.

The first time I listened to it, I was cooking dinner; I wanted to kind of ease into it. I wanted to get a general impression while thinking of other things. I got a good impression. I recognized a few songs, including, “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” “Here Comes the Sun,” and, “Come Together,” and generally thought well of it. A solid rock album, and I could hear the foundations they were laying that would later be built upon by bands like Megadeth and Iron Maiden.

The next time I listened to the record was in the best possible situation for music appreciation: stuck on a bus with nowhere to go, using headphones. The mix really came alive. The band’s use of stereo seemed kind of juvenile, in a, “hey, y’all, look what I can do!” kind of way, but now that I understand what was going on at the time, I can’t help but view it as charming. Sort of like a bunch of kids at the park screeching like banshees.

My brother says that Ringo Starr got, “the biggest free ride of the century.” I don’t know that I agree. I do think that if there was a weak link in the band, at least on, “Abby Road,” it was Ringo, but it was only by comparison. Ringo’s performance did not make the album less good in any way I could detect, and I can’t think of anything he might have done differently  to make any particular song any better.

It’s also funny to be thinking about an album in terms of, “sides.” Side A of the album was obviously a collection of singles: great songs that stood alone. Side B, starting with, “Here Comes the Sun,” was a lot more stream of consciousness. That is, the songs seemed more connected, and they flowed from one to the next, often making it difficult for me to know without looking at my iPod if I was listening to a new song or not. I prefer the first side, myself, as the songs seem to have a much more defined rock ‘n roll structure about them. It’s no surprise that the songs from, “Abby Road,” that ended up on their, “1,” album were both from Side A. What is surprising is that only two of these songs made it to that particular compilation.

It’s easy for me now to understand what everybody’s been talking about all these years when they talk about how amazing the Beatles are. I’m not sure that it’s music that I would seek out and listen to on my own, but I’m not sure that it’s not, either. My mom asked if I regretted all those wasted years without their music in my library. After giving it some serious thought, I concluded that no, I don’t regret it. I wasn’t ready for them. Seems I really needed Music  237 at Cuesta College to get me ready for the Beatles. And maybe a decade and a half of horrible metal to soften me up.

It was a long battle. I went kicking and screaming. A thing I never expected happened: I’m a Beatles fan.