So I'm sitting on my back deck naked — it's fenced in, by the way — after a night at Tampa Theatre in which I saw a transcendent show by Shelby Lynne and then got kicked in the teeth after I waited more than an hour to meet her and get her to sign my cover story and she bagged on me, and I'm a little cranky, but I figure I'll have another drink. And a smoke. My wife's out of town. It's completely still, the moss hanging from the trees is not moving a milimeter.

I look over and see this Bic lighter on the table. It's been there for at least two months — in the sun and all the rain we've had lately. I figure this thing is waterlogged and sun-beaten for weeks on end, will it light? I pick it up, click it once, just a spark, click it twice, a spark, click it three times, and the thing fires up.

You go, Bic lighter. Used to be "lighters up" at rock concerts. Now it's "cell phones up." I like "lighters up" way better.

I put my one-dollar Bic lighter in a dresser drawer, knowing I can count it.

This article appears in Jul 16-22, 2008.

Eric Snider is the dean of Bay area music critics. He started in the early 1980s as one of the founding members of Music magazine, a free bi-monthly. He was the pop music critic for the then-St. Petersburg...