Hilton Head Monthly — A few weeks ago, John Mellencamp wandered through a large and shiny mall in Indianapolis in a futile, climate-controlled and probably Cinnabon-smelling hunt for the record store.

This was, of course, a terrible idea, in part because you can imagine what happens when John Mellencamp wanders unannounced through a mall in Indianapolis, but also because he’d have had about as much luck finding a reliable VCR repairman or some MySpace gear; who knows the last time the mall had a record store. So he abandoned the search and did the only logical thing he could — went over to the Apple store. “The place was packed,” Mellencamp said. “Packed. People swarming in line, the way the record store was when we were kids.”

That was, needless to say, some time ago; these days when you accidentally stumble across a record store it feels weird, like an abandoned mining town or an undervisited museum. It looks passed over and it feels old-fashioned, but that makes sense, says Mellencamp, because so is rock ‘n’ roll.

“It’s done. It’s over. We killed it,” he says, pausing for effect between each little eulogy. “There’s nothing that’s going to revive it, or give us that extra little goose, like punk or grunge did. We ruined it. We outgrew it. So I’m kind of excited to see what’s next.”

Read the full story at Hilton Head Monthly.

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It's shocking how little effort was required to find this.

GateHouse — The boy has gotten up twice tonight so far, unable to sleep due to concerns that Cat Heaven and People Heaven are entirely separate places.

But before we discuss how I’ve managed to defuse the situation with some serious ninja-level Ghost-Cat Fathering Awesomeness, a little background:

My son would very much like to get a pet, specifically a cat, which he has judged far superior to a dog based on both slobber volume and evidence provided by the film “The Adventures of Milo and Otis,” which, in his defense, makes a pretty compelling case. But sadly, Dad is allergic to cats — not, mind you, in the way that makes Dad a little snuffly, but in the way that makes his esophagus constrict like he’s being Force-choked by Vader for saying something snippy about his big stupid battle station with the gaping security problems. Believe me, if it was just a matter of knocking back some sinus pills to ensure my son’s joy I’d pop them like Rush Limbaugh on prom night, but I’m stuck.

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• Bruce Springsteen – Kitty’s Back (9.19.78, Passaic, NJ)

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That said, unlike many of the things that come to dominate my son’s time (yeah I said it, NASCAR), I can identify the precise origin of the Cat Heaven mystery. Like most tiny humans, the boy tends to save his more pressing philosophical and spiritual questions for the very end of bedtime, after the books have been read and the teeth have been brushed and the lights have been turned out, because he knows that if he keeps talking Mom and Dad will stick around, because Mom and Dad are predictable like that, and because my son’s day, like that of all 6-year-olds, is maybe 70-75% filled with shockingly effective manipulative tactics.

Pictured: Basically every day in Cat Heaven

Moreover, there’s apparently a book in his first-grade classroom that ends with an ostensibly fictional depiction of cats enjoying whatever it is cats enjoy in Cat Heaven, which I suppose includes auto-replenishing litter boxes and a never-ending supply of fat, listless Jerrys and all the elderly widows you could dream of.

And it is this book, this Cat Heaven book, which I will immediately demand the school corporation ban just as soon as I get some closure on this “Bridge To Terabithia” business, that has caused my 6-year-old grave concerns about the nature of the afterlife, the impermanence of people and things and the possibility of constructing maybe a bus system to safely shuttle people to and from Cat Heaven. Actually, I think we left it at a high-speed train. (I suggested a catamaran — hah? HAH? — but that actually made him more upset, understandably.)

Now, when you are 34 years old, this is not a problem that comes up an awful lot; being not terrifically inclined to any of the top 10 or 12 religions, I’d never really considered the possibility that the afterlife would be filed by animal type, like some sort of ethereal cloud-zoo (albeit one with probably like the best dolphin show EVER — they could probably could like play Mah-Jongg up there with the flippers while hitting the volleyball-on-a-strong with their adorable noses and letting their angel-trainers waterski behind them).

This clip art lies. Squirrels are filthy.

But now that I think about it, I kind of hope it is, partly because that appeals to my  organizing tendencies, but also because, really, who wants a glorious eternal foreverlife filled with monkeys and millipedes and those gibbons with the weird faces and do not even get me started on squirrels, you little inexcusable chippy little disease-filled scrub brushes OH YES, I WILL SEE YOU IN THE PURE FIERY EMBRACE OF HELL, SQUIRRELS.

Anyway, as I was saying, sort of, when you’re on solo bedtime duty for the evening, and you are not exactly in possession of a sprawling theological knowledge base, and you are faced with a tearing-up six-year-old concerned that there is an unfathomably distant world populated entirely by cats wondering where their masters are and what the hell they’re supposed to do for string for the next million years, you do the only thing you can do: lie indiscriminately.

And this is what I did; I conjured myself up a tremendous tale about the entry requirements for Cat Heaven, assuring my son that I could produce proof, perhaps in the form of a map that I need to Photoshop immediately, that there’s at least a nice two-lane highway between Cat Heaven and People Heaven. (I did, however, refrain from pointing out my own personal belief that no cats would be remotely allowed in any Heaven I’d want any part of, and that they could just as well be shuttled to some sort of Vermin Limbo for all I care, with their fur all over everything making my eyes develop this weird red film-like thing that makes it exceedingly difficult to blink.) The story was a majestic thing, beautiful really, and now that I think about it, I think I’m onto some sort of serious Harry Potter-style kids’ book phenomenon here. Eight words: “The Five People You Meet In Cat Heaven.” Patent pending, you vultures.

How in the hell is this the first Google Image result for "jury duty"?

GateHouse — So I’ve got jury duty tomorrow (stupid inconvenient Constitution). More effective way to get out of it: Darth Maul costume, or answering every question by quoting Scientology text while crying?

Yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking: “Jeff,” you’re thinking, because you talk to your computer screen or newspaper and tragically lack the comforting touch of human contact, “Why don’t you do what everyone else does: wad up your summons and churk it straight into the trash, and when the policemen come to your door at 6:30 a.m. some quiet Tuesday in October, promptly claim you were on a three-month-long whaling-boat disrupting pilgrimage to the waters near Antarctica and of course wouldn’t have received your summons, which would have been lost on a table covered in blubber?”

Well, yes, that’s a spiffy idea — especially your well thought-out whaling-boat tale (nice work!). There are other good ideas too, such as meowing a lot, or arriving in a ball gown, or aggressively espousing deeply held prejudices against ethnic groups that don’t exist, such as Flttthbptedonians, or the Irish. But the problem is: I’ve done that already. Bunches of times.

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• Sir Mix-A-Lot – One Time’s Got No Case

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Tomorrow will be my second jury duty in just over three years. But I don’t have a lot of memory of the first stint, except that it was the MOST BLINDINGLY BORING DAY OF MY LIFE, and that counts every fantasy football draft I’ve been involved with and the day I went to Kelly Clarkson concert. (It was for work, people.)

It basically went like this: I arrived in a squat windowless brown building, was sent to a room and sat in that room for 18 consecutive hours counting ceiling tiles and dreaming up ways to kill myself with my shoelaces. Then we were shipped to a second room, where we were kept for three weeks, surviving on thin rations of occasional bowls of a nourishing gruel and sips of Mountain Dew. After that, a third room, containing paneling. Finally, we were marched into basically the setting for everything John Grisham has ever said in his life, complete with a mountainous, pink-skinned judge who referred to us all as “jur-ORs” was kind of funny and made a lot of jokes about fishing that I didn’t remotely understand. He was very stern but charming, in that Old Man Southern sort of way. I kind of kept waiting for Atticus Finch to walk in. And then at some point we were asked to stand, and he told us all to go either home or fishing, and there was knowing laughter, which I didn’t hear because I was sprinting out the door before somebody changed his mind.

Now, I believed that day officially constituted fulfillment of my civic duty for something like the next 600 years, so needless to say when the second summons arrived, I greeted it with an over-inflated sense of purported injustice I haven’t deployed since the BMG Music Service attempted to get me to pay for that Soul Asylum CD I didn’t order. (“Dear BMG, If you think I am going to pay you more than a penny for anything ever, let alone the Soul Asylum disc that came out after the Soul Asylum disc that everybody liked, you are on a runaway train to Unbalanced Ledgerville, and incidentally what in my profile would make you think I qualify for the Soul Asylum Featured Selection, because I’m clearly more of a Verve Pipe guy now.”)

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Hey wait a minute, I kind of still like this song.

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Do you know how something like this comes up, and you put it off, and they say, OK we’ll call you in six months, and you think, well, that shouldn’t be a problem because you can’t conceive of six months because it’s six months away and then six months go by and the new court date is immeasurably less convenient than the first one, so you put it off again, and this cycle repeats like four or five times? I have basically put off jury duty long enough that the guy on the phone the last time (six months ago), basically talked to me like the assistant principal on the horrible afternoon that Aaron Bradshaw was caught sending fictitious carnations to girls in our high school and blamed me: “Jeff, I’m surprised at you. I thought you cared more about your country than this.” (Principal Onda didn’t have quite that sense of civic responsibility, more of a barely concealed disgust that we were acting like children, but you get the idea.)

So I’m pretty sure I’m out of excuses for avoiding driving an hour up the road to potentially ladle out steaming bowls of Hot Fresh Justice Bisque. So I’ll go tomorrow, but so help me, that’s it, because if I get called a third time, there can be no reasonable explanation except a conspiracy by the Flttthbptedonians.

(Epilogue: I was dismissed early, and, in related news, have for sale a gorgeous new never-worn ball gown, size men’s L.)

Paste

This raises all sorts of questions. For instance, if you had a 7,000 square-foot mansion, would you entrust its renovation to a man who once renovated a pair of inflatable pants in a sparkly American Flag motif? And also, wouldn’t it be funny if all the other rapping relics from the 1990s got into the home-improvement business? We think it would. And we freely offer these business concepts to any of the artists mentioned in this link. CALL US.

NASCAR driver Greg Biffle, if you see my first-grader on the playground, you might want to watch your back.

GateHouse — It’s a static, shatterproof rule of parenting that, purely through nature and momentum, you will endeavor to pass on to your children your own interests and activities, either by grand design or subconscious manipulation, and yes I am looking at you, Couple Who Brought Your Four Grade-School Children To The Van Halen Concert In 2005, Seriously, That’s Shockingly Irresponsible, Mostly Because It Was A Hagar Tour, I Mean Roth I Can Justify, But The “Dreams” Guy Really What Are You Thinking? (I might also mention you, Juggalo Parent Nation.)

Happy Official Release Day to the absurdly talented New York-based jazz ensemble the Respect Sextet; their new digital-only release can be downloaded to your computer thing RIGHT NOW. Grab it quick so when they’re written up again in the New Yorker, Newsweek and/or New York Times you can say, “Pfft, I know those guys already.” (And no, I’m not just saying this because they asked me to write the liner notes. How dare you.)

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• Download “Farcical Built For Six” at Bandcamp or iTunes.

Rolling Stone — Bob Dylan and John Mellencamp’s tour wraps in September, but Mellencamp will continue on this fall with sixteen Midwestern dates in support of No Better Than This.

Unlike his immaculately produced ’80s albums, Mellencamp wrote this record quickly, on acoustic guitar, and recorded it in mono on a 55-year-old Ampex tape recorder. “I looked at T Bone and I said, ‘What the fuck were we doing in the ’80s?’” Mellencamp told RS. “I made a record once that took almost a year. I spent millions of dollars dicking around with songs, and in the long run it paid off because it sold millions of copies. But I go back and I listen to the record today, and it was…more of a craftsman thing.” Read the full story at Rolling Stone.

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• Stream the title track from “No Better Than This” at mellencamp.com

If Harry Potter land contained a spell which outlawed garments promoting Dale Earnhardt, Jr., and/or jorts, the waits in line would be about nine seconds each.

GateHouse — So we found ourselves with three days off and full-time weekend babysitting, so we did what I think most 35-year-old professional married couples would do when gifted with such a rare opportunity: Went promptly to Harry Potter land in Orlando. My idea was Chuck E. Cheese, but whatever, this was fine.

It’s not Harry Potter land, of course, and the lovely 29-year-old woman we met in line at Ollivander’s Wand Shop who dropped $800 and waited 10 hours to attend the park’s opening day would probably punch me in the quaffle unless I referred to at directly is The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, located at Universal’s Islands of Adventure theme park in Florida and basically the single most satisfying aggro-nerd experience I’ve had since the first time I rode “Star Tours,” which was EXACTLY LIKE Beggar’s Canyon back home, or the time we waited outside a Merrillville, Ind. hotel for 90 minutes to get our photo taken with “Weird Al” Yankovic.

Now, I’m not remotely a 800-bones-on-opening-day Potter fan, though it is true that I lost considerable sleep to the books, have been told that my patronus would resemble Springsteen (accurate), and once began concocting a reasonably logical plan to physically enter “Half-Blood Prince” to claim vengeance on Snape (not over it), but let me go on record as saying that The Wizarding World of Harry Potter went all sectumsempra on my expelliarmus. For those of you who read books from the grown-up part of the bookstore, this means it was totally worth it.

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• De La Soul – The Magic Number

Ollivander's. Despite the picturesque and misleading snow, temperatures in Orlando at press time were 350 degrees.

The primary draw is a ride called Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, one of those deals where you sit four across in a car/tram/train thing and dip and swerve and tilt in accordance with a giant movie screen in order to simulate, in this case, riding a broom around Hogwarts and playing quidditch, which, incidentally, knocked two things off my Bucket List in like 25 seconds.

Yet despite the youthful demographic that I guess this place is usually geared to or whatever, I am here to tell you that the Harry Potter ride is basically two minutes of giant spiders and Dementors in your face and is completely terrifying. Seriously, it’s basically all spiders. You leave the dank, dark cavern of spiders, and your car jerks up and to the left and into the screeching, pincer-y face of a giant spider. Then the car jerks you up and left and drops you 20 feet and into the apparent meal plan of, hey, weird, another spider. One sudden, up-and-to-the-right move, and, for a refreshing change of pace, it’s a huge and screeching spider which is spitting at you. It’s entirely possible there were more, but in order to confirm that for you, I’d have had to keep my eyes open.

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Related, sort of

• Midnight in the Barnes and Noble of Good and Evil: The “Harry Potter” release party
• A reading from the gospel of Chuck E. Cheese

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Anyway, after two minutes of choking back tears of panic on a kids’ ride, something like a tour of a fictitious wand shop starts to sound pretty perfect, so we went to Ollivander’s, a pretty wonderfully comprehensive simulation of the wand-selection process; the kindly gentlemen portraying the proprietor selects a child from the crowd and procures him a wand, that sort of thing. It’s all quite lovely, up until the moment that they disgorge you into the actual Wand Gift Shop, which is decidedly less magical, though no less crowded, and offers you, the sweat-stained Muggle, the opportunity to purchase your very own wand for $30, making them judging by the sales activity, the planet’s most coveted $30 sticks. The wands, I should point out, do not function, and thus are slightly whittled pieces of stick, in a box, for $30. In a later line we witnessed a pretend wand-fight, three kids fencing with nearly $100 of sanctioned twigs.

Ironically enough, $30 is what I would pay in a heartbeat for butterbeer, which is, of course, sold on site; it is basically very smooth cream soda, mixed with a root-beer float, topped with like a butterscotch foam. It is maybe the greatest thing on earth. It has powers you cannot dream of understanding. Literally, not a day goes by that I don’t think about butterbeer. Not. One. Day. Every time I’m at a meal and have to order a regular beer, I get a little legitimately sad. At one point we had to wait at the Three Broomsticks for the fictitious bartender to change the real keg, and we didn’t care, because we could stare at a barrel of butterbeer at a bar in Hogsmeade, which made the trip entirely worth it, especially since at that particular bar, there were no giant spiders.

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Cinderella: One wrong click and suddenly you’re on a page full of ornate period costumes, soaring magical anthems and fabulous hairstyles. There are also some sites about the Disney movie.

Paste — Rumor has it that early-’00s rap-rock ensemble Linkin Park chose to spell its name all funny-like for a simple reason: Someone had already grabbed LincolnPark.com, so the band went with pre-K phonetics and created the world’s first known fusion of search engine optimization and gloppy nu-metal. Regrettably, thousands more were to come.

If you’re going to get noticed online, you need to snag the teeny attention spans of potential new fans while staying accessible to old ones. Many bands address this problem with unconventional, eccentric or exceedingly dopey names like Them Crooked Vultures, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah or Taylor Swift. Yet plenty more clearly did not get the memo, because no one gets memos anymore, because they’re all online stealing music. For instance, I recently received a PR pitch from a band called One. A Google search for this band turns up, in order: 1) a group fighting AIDS and poverty, 2) the integer before two and 3) coconut water, which was delicious, but my point remains. A Paste list of bands that have made themselves bafflingly difficult to Google.

Do you see how the jellyfish here look all graceful and calming? FALSE. THEY'LL EAT YOUR FACE.

GateHouse — There have been a lot of jellyfish in the news lately, and by that I mean it’s possible that there have been a lot of jellyfish stories in the news lately. I have no idea, really, but I’ve personally encountered the same jellyfish story twice in 48 hours, and since taking one’s own personal experience, writing about it at breathless, context-free length and behaving as though you’ve uncovered a massing panic of national consequence is how the media works now, I figured I might as well board the Journalism 2.0 train. So what I meant to say there was INVADING MONSTER JELLYFISH WILL DEVOUR US WHOLE, AND ALSO I THINK THAT THEY ARE RACIST.

Anyway, the jellyfish story arrived first via a Friend on my Facebook wall, who I am immediately calling out because he’s the sort of person WHO WOULD POST A JELLYFISH STORY ON MY FACEBOOK WALL, which, for those who know me and my deep disapproval of floaty viscous goo-blobs that sting your face when you’re trying to kite-surf, is the new Most Direct Path To Getting Unfriended By Me, besting the previous winner, Videos From Your Children’s Many Recitals. (Seriously, Gooey Dead Jellyfish Pictures is the new Heather Wants To Share Some Cranberry Bushels With You In FarmVille! Which is to say, delete delete delete.)

The story was then echoed Saturday night by the 11-year-old offspring of friends whose obvious repeating of the story over the past few days had not lessened his relish in telling it. It opened with something on the order of “DidyouknowtherewasajellyfishinNewHampshirethathad45longtentaclesand150peoplewentothehospital?” breathlessly reported at speeds that would qualify him for inclusion in OutKast in the superheated, wild-eyed manner available only to 11-year-olds who are reporting to a passingly familiar adult a recent event in which many people were badly hurt.

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• Sting (with Jo Lawry) – You Will Be My Ain True Love

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Pictured: Basically the worst Spring Break ever (Photo / National Geographic)

Erm, no, I replied, wishing immediately that I had said, “Well, of course, my lad! Now run along and go collect frogs in the brook, you little rapscallion” or whatever 11-year-old do these days because what happened, of course, was that I got a Searing Killer Jellyfish story from a kid who took my escalating expressions of horror and impending projectile vomit as a cue to continue remembering details about what the many many tentacles and bulbous prehistorically massive jellyfish corpse looked like when they inevitably started washing up on the beach. (Turns out it looks like brown stretchable muscle tissue, mixed with very old teriyaki chicken and something you’d scrape off of a moose that had been beaten to death by a larger, criminally insane moose.)

Short version: About 150 people were stung last week in New Hampshire by what was originally thought to be a stomach-clearing 40-pound lion’s mane jellyfish, but what was revealed to be detached and wholly deceased parts of a stomach-clearing 40-pound lion’s mane jellyfish, namely the tentacles, which continue to deliver toxins when they’ve been relieved of the inconvenience of being attached to a jellyfish. A professor of zoology told the New York Times that the tentacles don’t disintegrate and are — I am quoting here through clenched fists — like “loose spaghetti” floating around. Kids, if you learn nothing else today, promise me you won’t eat any spaghetti you find floating in the ocean.

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Awesome.

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Putting aside temporarily the knowledge that tentacles can live by themselves for a while, which is another strike against my ever going snorkeling again in my life, there’s the greater matter at hand, namely that 40-pound lion’s mane jellyfishes are in New England and very likely elsewhere, given the exorbitant cost of living up there. I happen to live by what history textbooks will one day refer to as “the ocean,” and would be lying if I said my compulsion to go for a refreshing swim — even during our current 150-degree instasweating puppy-exploding heat wave — has been dramatically reduced in the past 48 hours. (Given that I live within 3,000 miles of the Gulf of Mexico, this has pretty much been decided for me already, but now I have two reasons.)

Happily, no one seemed to be seriously hurt in the jellyfish invasion, although I think we can pretty easily name 150 fewer potential members of New Hampshire’s after-school surfing clubs. Happily also, I’m going to try to trade Huge Dead Jellyfish for some Cranberry Bushels.