Okay, Baltimore. Today is the last day for you to go over and vote for us in the Mobbies. Go ahead. Click over and do it now. We’ll wait.

Are you back? Okay. Cool. Thanks for that.

Anyway, We’re still hoping to pull out a win in the Music/Nightlife category. We seem to have fallen well behind in the Personal category, which is strange to us, because we continue to think of this first and foremost as a personal blog. It’s solely about the things that we do and think of day in and day out. We just happen to like seeing live music and drinking in bars more than most people.

A visual approximation of dinner at the Chophouse tonight.

Case in point: tonight we will not be attending the Youth Brigade show at the Sidebar. Likewise, we also won’t be going down to DC for the Suicidal Tendencies. And there’s no fucking way we’re going to pay $30 to see Saves the Day at Sonar.

These are all bands we like. At least, we liked them in their time and place. For all of these acts though, their time is well in the past. We’ve already gone on record with our feelings about old bands as well as their aging fanbase, and all of these shows fall squarely into that category. It’s hard to call yourself Youth Brigade when you’re fucking 50, and we’d like to see the fat, aging Mike Muir try to get on a skateboard these days. These bands were about the coolest thing going in the year we were born and if we’re feeling old in 2010, then they must have roadies who are just in charge of Ben Gay, Icy Hot, and prune juice.

Saves the Day gets a bit of a pass, since they’re only about 30, but as a band they have definitely not aged well. Can’t Slow Down was a near perfect post-high school record, but at this point we’re- uhh, very post high school. We used to love seeing this band play in churches, garages, and even a barn, but by the time we saw them in 2005 at the 9:30 Club they were barely recognizable and very disappointing.

So this is not a post about those shows. It’s a post about how the Chop is an old man, and is going to have some of our other old man friends in for dinner tonight. We could post a recipe or two, but we just don’t do that. We might make a risotto or some sort of stuffed peppers. We’re also thinking roasted potatoes and a seasonal salad, and maybe some of the scratch-made corn chowder we’ve still got on hand.

We’re also going to drink brown liquor and talk about how great things used to be and how everything is terrible now, as old men are wont to do.

This is a post about that.