I got the blues interrupted blues

If I happen to be home on a Saturday night I liked to listen to 1) Randy Bachmann's Vinyl Tap, and 2) Saturday Night Blues with Holger Petersen. A lot of the time, I prefer a quiet evening at home if the alternative is a noisy night out. I'm particularly enjoying it at the moment, because I'm reminded of last weekend, when we held S.'s birthday party in our relatively small apartment that doesn't have air-conditioning. I don't mind this horribly, but when the place was packed with warm bodies complaining about the heat, I really wanted some air-conditioning.

So this quiet evening is rather pleasant. S.is at work for the evening, and I've been puttering around, watering my plants and nipping out for groceries, and behaving in a manner that feels very old for someone 25 years of age. At least, it feels old in a Saturday night kind of way. It also feels comforting.

At the moment I'm tackling my freezer. We have an older fridge that does not defrost itself. And so every so often the frost situation gets so bad that it's no longer possible to buy frozen food because it won't even fit. Also, the door stops closing entirely.

Things like this, defrosting freezers and cleaning bathtubs and toilets - all of those things that are necessary to keep your home clean and running efficiently I can't believe how much I sound like a woman from a 1950s detergent commercial aaaahhh - can be made so much more pleasant if one has some nice tunes to go along with it. I often like to have upbeat music, something electro-poppy like MGMT or Le Tigre. Just to keep me going strong.

But tonight is Saturday night, and the blues are on the radio, and I love it. The blues was one of my first loves, musically. My parents raised me on Raffi and Eric Neglar, and then once we grew out of kiddie music, it was a choice between country music in the car with my mom, and blues in the car with my dad. I won't lie; when I was about 11 I went through a big country music phase. I had a Shania Twain poster and everything.

I also loved the blues, and my dad always talked about this or that show he had been to at the El Mocambo in 1960-whatever. I'm not great with the who's-who of the blues world, but I know what I like, and almost all of it appeals to me.

After I had my 19 birthday, and could legally drink, my dad and I would regularly stop in at Grossman's Tavern (Toronto's Home of the Blues, located at Spadina Avenue and Cecil Street, in downtown Toronto, near Kensington Market) to catch a set, and often to see our neighbour play the drums in his band.

So when I am at home on a Saturday night, it is always the blues. However, this is a Saturday night during the G20 summit, and Holger Petersen is regularly being cut off for updates, which are really a re-hash of breaking news from earlier today. It really gets my goat. I like the news, I have the radio on almost all the time when I'm home. I like hearing what's going on in the world. I particularly like CBC because they give me the serious news, and then of course you get shows like As It Happens, which will interview someone who managed to grow a really big cabbage.

But, damn it, these are my fucking blues, man. I'm relaxing and I don't need to hear about ignorant protesters who believe that they aren't the violent people in these situations because they aren't the ones wearing riot gear. "We don't have guns, they do!" some guy said in a sound bite. No, no, you're just throwing bricks and Molotov cocktails, a perfectly innocent bit of activity for a bit of romp around town. I'm sure someone in Thailand would gladly kick your ass for willingly creating a hostile atmosphere in an otherwise stable part of the world.

If there is one upside to regular news updates, it's that the journalists who have been reporting from the streets are managing to speak to what sounds like the least intelligent selection of individuals I have heard on the radio in quite some time.