I didn't want to get up today.

And then I realized I needed to get up so I could go to bed at a reasonable hour so I could get up tomorrow and go back to work.

Eventually I dragged myself out of bed, made some coffee and breezed through yesterday's paper.

Dennis Hopper died. And Gary Coleman. But we knew Hopper was dying. It'd been all over the news about him getting a quickie divorce from his last wife so he could die single and in peace. Or something like that.

I was going to watch Easy Rider last night, but ended up in another direction.

I'm not going to watch a "Different Strokes" marathon.

Hey, maybe The Strokes can call their reunion album "Different Strokes." Except it's the same band, just a decade or so later.

So this is the start to the summer. Not officially summer, but the idea of summer. The hot days. Still pretty warm nights. No new TV (for the most part). Festivals. Kids going crazy because there's no more school for a few months. Three straight months of harassing citizens about their drinking habits (y'know, before the traditional holiday harassment...).

And, apparently, the oil leak just keeps on leaking.

I'm thinking that any time in the next few months (the estimate is now to get it fixed by August, but how would they know that? They haven't figured out how to fix it yet!) any of us not employed by BP get yelled at about not doing our job in a timely manner just have to say, "Well, the fucking oil leak is still leaking. At least my screw ups didn't cause the biggest environmental disaster since Chernobyl."

It just might work.

But I'm partial to Easy Rider (versus Blue Velvet or Waterworld). I didn't see it until the 90s, but then the 90s is when I started to expand my pop culture world. Before that, I was a slave to the new. Whatever was new had to be better than the old.

College was a nice mind expander, though. And after college, that was good, too. Suddenly I didn't necessarily have to study anything. So I studied music and movies and whatever else I could do in my spare time.

Apocalypse Now as well. But that wasn't Hopper's deal. He was more of a hanger on.

So we'll go with Easy Rider. Even though I'm not a motorcycle man. And there's that whole bad trip Mardi Gras thing. The first review I read (it was from Baked Potatoes, for the stoned movie watcher) said to turn the movie off after New Orleans. Trust us, it said.

I understand why. It's a buzz kill. But you need the ending. Otherwise, what the hell was all of that about?

Which is pretty much what I've been trying to figure out for a while.

Matt Worley isn't sticking to anything he's said over the last few days.