Friday night Jen and I were invited over to Todd and Heather’s place to visit, but wound up waiting at home for the Accidental Tourist. I’m calling Jen’s Dad the Accidental Tourist because we’re never really sure if he’s going to stop by when he says he might or not. Sometimes he travels out of town on business or up to Pennsyltucky and drives within a half-mile of our house, and doesn’t stop in to say hello. Which is kind of perplexing, because there’s really nothing we’d like more than to sit and have a glass of soda with the Captain and shoot the breeze. More often than not, though, he zooms past and on to his destination like Byrd racing to the Pole at some ungodly hour of the evening, and Jen calls the house repeatedly to check in. (He has a cellphone, which I’m told is older than Methuselah and about the size of a luxury sedan. It is never turned on, and would probably explode if it was.) Usually he’ll have made it home at 4am and caught forty winks and then gotten up to go to work, and he makes this sound like it’s an ordinary day at the office. The man, I’m convinced, is some kind of Navy-programmed sleep robot.

Anyway, he did actually stop by Friday night for a slice of pizza and a glass of water, and we caught up for an hour, and then he beat feet out of here, and we were left with the rest of an empty Friday evening to deal with. Which we filled with some PBR and the A&E Biography of the Bee Gees. Now before you go telling me that the Bee Gees weren’t punk rock and all of that shit, consider:

They were the only band in history to have five #1 hits in the top 10 at one time.

They were one of the only acts to have #1 hits in four consecutive decades.

Barry produced something like 14 #1 hit songs.

Robin had teeth almost as bad as Shane McGowan. That’s punk, motherfucker.

Before you think I’ve gone all Neil Diamond on you, I hated that song Barry did with Streisand too. But some of that mid-70’s Bee Gees stuff is killer. This evening, Jen and I were discussing the soundtracks our lives, and there’s a period of time in my life scored by both the Grease and Saturday Night Fever albums. (Particularly, the theme to Grease for me is driving in a brown Duster across New Jersey with my mother, sister, and the Greame kids, all of us singing along with Frankie Valli at the top of our lungs. It turns out Barry wrote and produced that song.) There were a lot of things I learned about the Brothers Gibb, and after the show finished, I had to throw down some mad props to the boys. (I forgot to pour out a little on the ground for Maurice, though. Rest in peace, my man.)

So it was pretty humorous to have heard about four Bee Gees songs while we were out today. (I think it was) “How Can You Mend A Broken Heart” was playing in the local garden store, where we bought a gardenia to plant somewhere in the yard to remind us of Savannah. “Tragedy” came on in the warehouse section of IKEA, as we were trying to decide whether or not to buy the queen size mattress we saw there, which was suprisingly firm but forgiving. (It’s being delivered on Tuesday. Cross your fingers for us.) “To Love Somebody” was playing while we ate dinner at Matthew’s and tried to ignore the basketball spectators.

It was a good day, and we’re hoping that the protective shield of the Bee Gee’s falsetto harmonies will bring luck with the purchase of our new mattress.