Tom Ray

So this commercial, I saw it just the other day. It had the song “Beth” by KISS playing in the background.

It reminded me of two things.

The first was, this is the only song the drummer Peter Criss from the band did that was any good.

The second, was something I thought only I had done. I would re-write the lyrics for it with another girls name and give it to them as a poem.

What I mean is this. When I was in grade school I was a huge KISS fan. And when I listened to the song I knew it was a love song, I didn’t understand it, but I knew by the tone it was a love song.

I was interested in a girl, I think her name was Lisa. I got a piece of paper, took the vinyl record out of the sleeve and played the song.

Then on the carpet, using the album cover as a flat surface I would write out the lyrics to the song (what I understood of them), replacing the word “Beth” with “Lisa” of course.

I thought I was so clever to have thought of this.

After seeing this recent commercial, I told that story to a few people I knew. Turns out some of them had also done this growing up. Down to using the cover as a flat surface.

What really made me think was this – I can see where I did this on those old albums when I look at them.

When people search for vintage vinyl, do they see this? Do they look for it? The indentation from a kids pencil, pressing hard the words of love embossed on the cover of an old album?

##Think about it for a second.

The plot of the movie Roadhouse with Patrick Swayzie is basically this:

A small community that seems to be just a general store and 2 bars. One man extorts money from this general store, that can barely get by. Yet, this seems to be enough to pay his crew of 4 men to go there and collect it every week.

The plot of the 80’s show The A-Team is usually this:

A shop or family owned business is being extorted by someone who leads a group of guys. While the family business barely makes enough to get by, this bad guy wants to get them out of the picture so they can corner the market and get rich.

I feel these stories should be taught in business classes.

As thanksgiving approaches every year I get another chance to tell the origin of my name.

While one phenomena has always been that everyone, including my wife, has always called me by my full name. Tom Ray. As if it were one word.

But the real story is the first name, Tom.

My parents had a sense of humor and this is the story they told me when I was young.

Since I was born around thanksgiving, they named me Tom. So if you get that reference at all, they basically told me I’m named after Tom Turkey. Which seemed normal because my grandma did like to call me a turkey.

As great as a story that is to tell a young boy, they weren’t done yet.

They informed my that I was lucky I was born around that time. Since it was the dawn of the disco era, they told me originally my name was to be Sunshine.

Think about that for a second. Sunshine Ray.

If this whole story is true I could have grown up to be a very different person.

So thank you turkey!

Outside of the fact that every year Christmas decorations appear in stores earlier than the year before. Why does Halloween end so abruptly? Turned off like a light switch.

It is the morning after Halloween and my email inbox is already filled with holiday promotions. As I am writing this, I just got an invite to my friends annual Christmas party.

I’m just curious why it doesn’t get the same time consideration as Christmas? I’m just supposed to move right on to the next.

But when Christmas is over, its perfectly OK to keep your decorations up well into February.

I think I’m just upset that I know winter is coming.

I have a problem I need to fix.

While I control and manage most of my creative projects personally, I can always picture the end result I want in my head.

This is good for what I want to do–But bad for trying to get it done.

As I start to work on say, a website, imagery or anything visual, if it doesn’t look like it should right away, I will get sidetracked trying to fix it first before moving on.

Case in point, I am redesigning my bands website to match the theme with an upcoming song release. And I have been obsessing over the featured content box on the homepage.

I know I have the entire rest of the website to finish but I can’t look at it with out thinking it appears terrible to me.

I finally had to make myself stop. Move to the next section.

Gave myself one more day to work on it. If the rest of the site didn’t make it tie together, then I would scrap it and start over.

I have more things to cover than just a feature widget. This fussing before I finish just becomes a delay.

I wonder if I need to start thinking about utilizing fivver more? Outsourcing things so I can learn to let them go.

Why do things seem to never look like you think they should as you build?