No, I don’t proof read. Is there a space in proof read? Proofread. It doesn’t look right… let’s check. Huh. My dictionary, not the one with the scribblely red lines under misspelled words on my screen, but the one on my desk with the cover and the pages and the tiny print, the one that I actually use, says that proofread is a word. Holy crap. Whether I wanted to or not, I’ve learned something tonight. So, no, I don’t proofread my posts. In fact, I barely ever go back to read them at all; I just kind of lurch this crap out of me, and before I know it, I’ve clicked the post button for you to read. But on the occasion that I do go back and reread my literal upchuckage, I notice that I am probably chemically unbalanced, I also notice all of my typos, as I’m sure you have. I don’t really care that I leave out a subject once in a while, or maybe I don’t keep the proper tense throughout a story line, or a thought will end mid sentence as I suddenly want to write about something else, or I will commit my biggest grammatical error, the passive voice. I had a professor that nailed me on using the passive voice in every paper I turned into him. Gordon, you tabla playing mofo.
And speaking of thoughts that get cut off, I have to go get my boots that I left in the back of my buddy’s car that night last week when the bartenders decided that they weren’t going to serve a person wearing a tux in their bar because the modern trend is the wear plaid and look like a hunter and I looked like a guy in a tux, even though I’ve been wearing plaid since I was two and was only wearing a tux because I was coming from a ten hour work day which I was only at because I need money to go to bars to get served by bartenders. So I stormed out, and left my boots in the back seat of my buddy’s car.
In other news, I have good news, which I may or may not tell you later.
In other news, I want to rant about Christmas, which I most defiantly with catapult at you later. (That last sentence, that one right there, that was the passive voice. Damn you, Gordon. Damn you to literary hell.)
In other news, I wish I could visit my cousins’ new baby in DC with my parents. His name is Kai and I’ve been told that Kai is Swedish for Obsquatch, which means they named that little guy after me.
I’m off to get my boots, then I’m off to celebrate my reunification with my boots by taking them out for a bourbon. Each of them. And one for me. Shall I cheers you as well? Fine then. Screw proofreading, I’m more for cheersing. Consider yourself cheersed.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Monday, December 21, 2009
In Recent News - or - Lust For Worklessness
I am currently two hours and forty two minutes late for work and I honestly don't have a care in the world. I drooled in my sleep last night, which is always indicative of a need for more sleep. I fell asleep with lights on, books open, a ukulele across my chest, schedules ignored, emails half written, and a haze of exhaustion so thick that I needed a ice scraper to remember last name, which evidently is Ice Scraper. Baron Obsquatch Von Ice Scraper the Nothingth of Uke-Uke. Behold.
I've spent my conscious morning away from work realizing that I haven't had any time off of recent past. As the minutes slip by in which I should have been selling poinsettias to white people, I've calculated that of the last fifty days, I've had four days to myself, which were usually spent in bed, drooling. And don't think that the forty six days that I've spent working were simple little days. Oh no, that would be folly. The busiest days of the year and I the longest days of the year were lined up for me over the past six weeks, and I've been handcuffed to a radiator of responsibility just waiting for them. So two hours and now, fifty two minutes into my shift without me being there doesn't seem so bad. I know that will change come January first, when my schedule and my savings account will most likely resemble a mime in the middle of a mine field, silently yet over enthusiastically blow to tiny unrecognizable bits of what once was, but in all honesty, I look forward to a time like that. Not recognizing my schedule after dealing with the schedule I've been dealing with can only be a good thing. I have a new job lined up, which I am excited 'bout. I have a plan to get some classes under my belt this spring. I have business relationships that are starting to solidify into potential career opportunities, and I have a drool stained pillow case. These are all good indicators of the success of the Baron Von Ice Scraper clan, which currently has a roster of one, and I'm shoeless and in my underwear, almost three hours late for work, typing a blog.
I've spent my conscious morning away from work realizing that I haven't had any time off of recent past. As the minutes slip by in which I should have been selling poinsettias to white people, I've calculated that of the last fifty days, I've had four days to myself, which were usually spent in bed, drooling. And don't think that the forty six days that I've spent working were simple little days. Oh no, that would be folly. The busiest days of the year and I the longest days of the year were lined up for me over the past six weeks, and I've been handcuffed to a radiator of responsibility just waiting for them. So two hours and now, fifty two minutes into my shift without me being there doesn't seem so bad. I know that will change come January first, when my schedule and my savings account will most likely resemble a mime in the middle of a mine field, silently yet over enthusiastically blow to tiny unrecognizable bits of what once was, but in all honesty, I look forward to a time like that. Not recognizing my schedule after dealing with the schedule I've been dealing with can only be a good thing. I have a new job lined up, which I am excited 'bout. I have a plan to get some classes under my belt this spring. I have business relationships that are starting to solidify into potential career opportunities, and I have a drool stained pillow case. These are all good indicators of the success of the Baron Von Ice Scraper clan, which currently has a roster of one, and I'm shoeless and in my underwear, almost three hours late for work, typing a blog.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
One Great Quote - or - Can I Watch This Crappy Movie Yet?
Why do bad things happen to good people?
"Bad things happen to good people to keep them good people. I'll take a bad thing happening to count myself among them anyday."
-Tactless Grace
Chew on that.
Now that I've privately processed today's events, I'm gonna watch G.I. Joe because when I tried to rent Terminator I broke the DVD rental machine. Ironic.
"Bad things happen to good people to keep them good people. I'll take a bad thing happening to count myself among them anyday."
-Tactless Grace
Chew on that.
Now that I've privately processed today's events, I'm gonna watch G.I. Joe because when I tried to rent Terminator I broke the DVD rental machine. Ironic.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Marv's Soliloquy - or - Time To Take A Walk
Rain doesn’t come to Sin City real often, and when it does, it’s usually pretty lame stuff. Warm as sweat and lucky if it gets to the pavement before it evaporates.
But maybe twice a year, the desert sky really coughs it up and spits it out. A cold, mean torrent that turns the streets to glass and chills you to the bone.
Most people hate the rain when it’s nasty like this. But me, I love it. It helps me think.
I’m not real smart, but I feel a whole lot smarter when everything goes slick and everybody skitters off the streets and gets out of my way.
I love the rain. I love the icy way it creeps down my neck. The way the air goes electric and everything seems so clear.
You breath in and your nostrils work.
That’s what I do. I breathe and I just let my feet take we wherever they want.
And I think.
-Frank Miller’s Sin City – Chapter 1 – Episode Eleven
But maybe twice a year, the desert sky really coughs it up and spits it out. A cold, mean torrent that turns the streets to glass and chills you to the bone.
Most people hate the rain when it’s nasty like this. But me, I love it. It helps me think.
I’m not real smart, but I feel a whole lot smarter when everything goes slick and everybody skitters off the streets and gets out of my way.
I love the rain. I love the icy way it creeps down my neck. The way the air goes electric and everything seems so clear.
You breath in and your nostrils work.
That’s what I do. I breathe and I just let my feet take we wherever they want.
And I think.
-Frank Miller’s Sin City – Chapter 1 – Episode Eleven
A/V Christmas: A Short Story
“Does that heartless bastard know just what kind of cancerous ball of hate his incessant toddling is creating inside of me?”
I am on my hands and knees, face half pressed up against the wall, jamming power cables, speaker cables, and DMX lines underneath a one-inch gap between the bamboo slatted floor and the eerily spotless white and surprisingly cold gallery walls. Newer buildings create this exact air gap between the floors and walls specifically for cables of all sorts to be jammed into them by guys like me for events like this; the nicer the building, the smaller the gap, the more cramming I have to do. This is a very new, very nice building with very small gaps and my cables are popping out before I can tape them down. I’m currently in the grand lobby of the brand new Modern Wing of the Chicago Art Institute. It’s only been open for about a year and is already jammed to the gills with what some people consider art but I consider punch-lines to a whole bunch of jokes that I just don’t get.
I have a roll of black gaff tape with me to tape down the cables once they are sufficiently stuffed into this gap and out of sight. If you didn’t know, gaff tape is far superior to duct tape. It has a matte finish, not shiny like duct tape, so if you have lights illuminating a room that the event coordinator wants lit up like a Christmas tree, even though everyone else wants as dark as a dungeon, no one sees your tape reflecting the light back at them from the one inch gap between the floor and the wall. That’s why people don’t notice that floor/wall gap, because of gaff tape. Gaff tape doesn’t leave a sticky residue on your cables after you peel it off your gear when the party is over. It is very easy to tear with your bare hands or with your teeth, unlike duct tape which takes a grizzly bear like rage to unadhere from your cables at the end of the night when all you want to do is get your ass home and enjoy a drink that no matter how much ice you use, will still burn on the way down. Gaff tape makes a very satisfying ripping sound when you rip it. Duct tape just pisses me off. Gaff tape, or gaffers tape, or “Permacell P-665” as the techie-knuckle-head-who-want-to-seem-more-knowledgable-than-he-really-is-when-he-asks-to-borrow-your-stuff-cause-he-didn’t-come-prepared-and-now-needs-to-use-your-shit-to-get-his-job-done-right-even-though-he-is-pissing-off-everyone-who-is-already-doing-the-job-right-without-using-words-like-Permacell calls it, is an industry standard. Duct tape is for suckers. Because gaff tape is so much better than duct tape, the stuff cost three times as much and is next to impossible to find. Everyone in the industry has “a guy”, a gaff hook-up, a secret supplier of these coveted rolls of AV-tech gold. My guy gets me 3” wide rolls, the standard width is 2”. Many a techie knuckle head has asked where I get it. I usually refer them to their mother. Right now, it seems like that roll of tape on the shiny bamboo art gallery floor is my only friend on the face of the planet. It is certainly being nicer to me than that jackass practicing goddamn Soon It Will Be Christmas Time on his saxophone. The problem with these big halls is this, that goddamn sax player is clear on the other side of this giant empty room, but he sounds like he’s playing inches from my ears. I want to punch him in the neck.
“Will someone kindly drag that inconsiderate waste of carbon out into the middle of the street and shoot him?”
I’m sweating and stressed out and pissed off and my knees hurt. I’m too old and banged up from having fun and making mistakes to put this kind of pressure on my knees, and this bamboo floor, although scuff-proof and shiny, is not what I envision when I think of the last surface I would like to comfortably kneel on. I was really hoping to be found dead kneeling in front of the largest ball of twine in Minnesota, or underneath a giant ice sculpture of Hephaestus, the Greek god of fire, or kneeling face down in a chafing dish behind the sneeze guard of an all you-can-eat bacon buffet. Stupid holiday parties. Stupid rookie teckie knuckle heads. Stupid event planners. Stupid broken knees. Stupid Christmas carols being played on a stupid saxophone. At least I have my 3” gaff tape.
“Better yet, why doesn’t someone drag me into one of these overly lit galleries and blow my brains out all over the wall. Come to think of it, I bet I could pass for a goddamn work of art. I might even make a couple of million bucks if my gray matter is splattered around artistically enough. Hell, this could be the beginning of a beautiful career for me as a well-lit piece of meat smeared against a wall with a bullshit frame around it and the working title I Fucking Hate Christmas Music This Much.”
That gets a chuckle out of Steve. He’s just kinda standing there, listening to me complain, watching me boil, not lifting a finger to help. Steve is my assistant. He is older than me, lazy as hell, and balding. By balding, I mean that Steve is almost completely bald but can’t bring himself to shave off the little tuft of dirty blond hair that sits straight up on the top of his forehead. It’s like an island of sad, thin, wispy strands, perched on the top of his head, standing straight up almost in defiance of the surrounding sea of shinny, smooth, bald scalp. He’s real sensitive about his hair. I mentioned it once and he got all kinds of pissy with me.
“I’ll fuckin do it, man.” he chuckles.
“What? Tape down these stupid damn cables so that I can save just enough mobility in my knees to get bent over by the boss when pay day rolls around?”
“No. I’ll blow your brains out in gallery 183 if it will make me a cool million.”
“Aren’t you a saint.”
“Screw it, I’ll do it for twenty bucks.”
“Are you asking me to pay you twenty bucks to blow my brains out? I think you are missing the point here, Steve. Besides, there are Picassos in 183 and you’d have to be pretty fancy with that shotgun to arrange me in a way that he hasn’t already thought up.”
Steve is a little bit cross-eyed and totally worthless. He is just standing there watching me tape down these cables. I could make him do it, I am his boss after all, but then he’s just gonna bitch about it all night. I didn’t want to hire him for tonight’s gig, I knew tonight was going to be a hell gig no matter who I put on it with me. Even if I had Sunrise Adams as an assistant, in cut-off jean shorts and knee pads, I’d still be taping these goddamn cables down underneath this goddamn gap between the floor and the wall and that goddamn saxophone would still be playing goddamn Christmas songs. My normal assistant copped out last minute, something about an allergic reaction to his new laundry detergent, so Steve got the call. If he’s talking to you in a crowd of people, you never really know if he is really talking to you or to the space just over your left shoulder. It’s for just that reason that I try not to talk to him at all. It also gets me out of conversations like this one.
“I’m pretty good with a shotgun.”
“Go tell that saxophone player to shut the hell up.” I grumble as a leave a streak of forehead sweat across the pristine white walls.
He cups his hands together around his mouth.
“HEY! SHUT THE FUCK UP, WILL YA!”
Jesus Christ. What kind of idiot yells, “shut the fuck up” across the grand lobby of an art gallery? His brain might be mush, but the balls on that guy could probably drive nails into oak. In his defense, the offending Yule Tidings stopped almost instantly.
“Nice, Steve. Real pro.”
“My work here is done. I’m gonna go take a piss. You want anything?”
“What, like from the bathroom? No I don’t want anything. What I want you to do some damn work, Steve.”
“I hate taping cables.”
“You know that it is a fundamental part of your job to tape down cables. The job that I pay you real money to do includes taping down cables. In fact, the majority of the work that someone in your position does for me, the person who hires you, is taping down the fucking cables. So when you say you hate taping down cables, it’s like a fisherman saying that they hate fishing.”
“I love fishing.”
“Than you are in the wrong business, buddy. Do you see any water? Do you see a boat? Do you see worms, or poles, or Gordan the goddamn fisherman? Can you taste the mother fucking freshness, Steve?! No. But there are a shit load of cables than need to be taped down.”
“Alright, asshole. I get it. I gotta take a piss, then I’ll tape down your damn cables. Okay?”
“I’ll do it. Just meet me back at the control desk. I’m canceling Christmas this year.”
I am on my hands and knees, face half pressed up against the wall, jamming power cables, speaker cables, and DMX lines underneath a one-inch gap between the bamboo slatted floor and the eerily spotless white and surprisingly cold gallery walls. Newer buildings create this exact air gap between the floors and walls specifically for cables of all sorts to be jammed into them by guys like me for events like this; the nicer the building, the smaller the gap, the more cramming I have to do. This is a very new, very nice building with very small gaps and my cables are popping out before I can tape them down. I’m currently in the grand lobby of the brand new Modern Wing of the Chicago Art Institute. It’s only been open for about a year and is already jammed to the gills with what some people consider art but I consider punch-lines to a whole bunch of jokes that I just don’t get.
I have a roll of black gaff tape with me to tape down the cables once they are sufficiently stuffed into this gap and out of sight. If you didn’t know, gaff tape is far superior to duct tape. It has a matte finish, not shiny like duct tape, so if you have lights illuminating a room that the event coordinator wants lit up like a Christmas tree, even though everyone else wants as dark as a dungeon, no one sees your tape reflecting the light back at them from the one inch gap between the floor and the wall. That’s why people don’t notice that floor/wall gap, because of gaff tape. Gaff tape doesn’t leave a sticky residue on your cables after you peel it off your gear when the party is over. It is very easy to tear with your bare hands or with your teeth, unlike duct tape which takes a grizzly bear like rage to unadhere from your cables at the end of the night when all you want to do is get your ass home and enjoy a drink that no matter how much ice you use, will still burn on the way down. Gaff tape makes a very satisfying ripping sound when you rip it. Duct tape just pisses me off. Gaff tape, or gaffers tape, or “Permacell P-665” as the techie-knuckle-head-who-want-to-seem-more-knowledgable-than-he-really-is-when-he-asks-to-borrow-your-stuff-cause-he-didn’t-come-prepared-and-now-needs-to-use-your-shit-to-get-his-job-done-right-even-though-he-is-pissing-off-everyone-who-is-already-doing-the-job-right-without-using-words-like-Permacell calls it, is an industry standard. Duct tape is for suckers. Because gaff tape is so much better than duct tape, the stuff cost three times as much and is next to impossible to find. Everyone in the industry has “a guy”, a gaff hook-up, a secret supplier of these coveted rolls of AV-tech gold. My guy gets me 3” wide rolls, the standard width is 2”. Many a techie knuckle head has asked where I get it. I usually refer them to their mother. Right now, it seems like that roll of tape on the shiny bamboo art gallery floor is my only friend on the face of the planet. It is certainly being nicer to me than that jackass practicing goddamn Soon It Will Be Christmas Time on his saxophone. The problem with these big halls is this, that goddamn sax player is clear on the other side of this giant empty room, but he sounds like he’s playing inches from my ears. I want to punch him in the neck.
“Will someone kindly drag that inconsiderate waste of carbon out into the middle of the street and shoot him?”
I’m sweating and stressed out and pissed off and my knees hurt. I’m too old and banged up from having fun and making mistakes to put this kind of pressure on my knees, and this bamboo floor, although scuff-proof and shiny, is not what I envision when I think of the last surface I would like to comfortably kneel on. I was really hoping to be found dead kneeling in front of the largest ball of twine in Minnesota, or underneath a giant ice sculpture of Hephaestus, the Greek god of fire, or kneeling face down in a chafing dish behind the sneeze guard of an all you-can-eat bacon buffet. Stupid holiday parties. Stupid rookie teckie knuckle heads. Stupid event planners. Stupid broken knees. Stupid Christmas carols being played on a stupid saxophone. At least I have my 3” gaff tape.
“Better yet, why doesn’t someone drag me into one of these overly lit galleries and blow my brains out all over the wall. Come to think of it, I bet I could pass for a goddamn work of art. I might even make a couple of million bucks if my gray matter is splattered around artistically enough. Hell, this could be the beginning of a beautiful career for me as a well-lit piece of meat smeared against a wall with a bullshit frame around it and the working title I Fucking Hate Christmas Music This Much.”
That gets a chuckle out of Steve. He’s just kinda standing there, listening to me complain, watching me boil, not lifting a finger to help. Steve is my assistant. He is older than me, lazy as hell, and balding. By balding, I mean that Steve is almost completely bald but can’t bring himself to shave off the little tuft of dirty blond hair that sits straight up on the top of his forehead. It’s like an island of sad, thin, wispy strands, perched on the top of his head, standing straight up almost in defiance of the surrounding sea of shinny, smooth, bald scalp. He’s real sensitive about his hair. I mentioned it once and he got all kinds of pissy with me.
“I’ll fuckin do it, man.” he chuckles.
“What? Tape down these stupid damn cables so that I can save just enough mobility in my knees to get bent over by the boss when pay day rolls around?”
“No. I’ll blow your brains out in gallery 183 if it will make me a cool million.”
“Aren’t you a saint.”
“Screw it, I’ll do it for twenty bucks.”
“Are you asking me to pay you twenty bucks to blow my brains out? I think you are missing the point here, Steve. Besides, there are Picassos in 183 and you’d have to be pretty fancy with that shotgun to arrange me in a way that he hasn’t already thought up.”
Steve is a little bit cross-eyed and totally worthless. He is just standing there watching me tape down these cables. I could make him do it, I am his boss after all, but then he’s just gonna bitch about it all night. I didn’t want to hire him for tonight’s gig, I knew tonight was going to be a hell gig no matter who I put on it with me. Even if I had Sunrise Adams as an assistant, in cut-off jean shorts and knee pads, I’d still be taping these goddamn cables down underneath this goddamn gap between the floor and the wall and that goddamn saxophone would still be playing goddamn Christmas songs. My normal assistant copped out last minute, something about an allergic reaction to his new laundry detergent, so Steve got the call. If he’s talking to you in a crowd of people, you never really know if he is really talking to you or to the space just over your left shoulder. It’s for just that reason that I try not to talk to him at all. It also gets me out of conversations like this one.
“I’m pretty good with a shotgun.”
“Go tell that saxophone player to shut the hell up.” I grumble as a leave a streak of forehead sweat across the pristine white walls.
He cups his hands together around his mouth.
“HEY! SHUT THE FUCK UP, WILL YA!”
Jesus Christ. What kind of idiot yells, “shut the fuck up” across the grand lobby of an art gallery? His brain might be mush, but the balls on that guy could probably drive nails into oak. In his defense, the offending Yule Tidings stopped almost instantly.
“Nice, Steve. Real pro.”
“My work here is done. I’m gonna go take a piss. You want anything?”
“What, like from the bathroom? No I don’t want anything. What I want you to do some damn work, Steve.”
“I hate taping cables.”
“You know that it is a fundamental part of your job to tape down cables. The job that I pay you real money to do includes taping down cables. In fact, the majority of the work that someone in your position does for me, the person who hires you, is taping down the fucking cables. So when you say you hate taping down cables, it’s like a fisherman saying that they hate fishing.”
“I love fishing.”
“Than you are in the wrong business, buddy. Do you see any water? Do you see a boat? Do you see worms, or poles, or Gordan the goddamn fisherman? Can you taste the mother fucking freshness, Steve?! No. But there are a shit load of cables than need to be taped down.”
“Alright, asshole. I get it. I gotta take a piss, then I’ll tape down your damn cables. Okay?”
“I’ll do it. Just meet me back at the control desk. I’m canceling Christmas this year.”
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Saturday, December 05, 2009
Nothin In The Fridge - or - Bright Lights, Caution Wet Floor
“Can I help you restock the Hamburger Helper?”
“I’d rather you not.”
“Why not? I used to love this stuff.”
“Cause you are drunk and I don’t know you.”
“That's valid enough.”
This is an actual conversation that I had with Peter in the pasta isle last night. I think there is really only one good time to go shopping at a super market; 4am. And only one state of mind to be in; drunk.
On the weekends, I work for a big band that plays weddings, and corporate galas, and fundraisers, and other posh events. After a 10-12 hour day, I will get out of work between 2-3am and I usually head straight home to read a few pages of Greek mythology and crash in an exhausted blob of over stressed muscle mass while listening to the lullaby of my ears ringing from blasting September to old happy white men who dance out of time with huge smiles on their wrinkled faces. That ringing has become my friend as it seems to drown out a lot of the pointless conversations that I am forced to have with people who insist on talking about how wonderful the Christmas decorations are and how much they love Christmas. If you didn't know, I fucking hate Christmas. Here's last years edition of my Christmas Hate List. This year's main reason for wanting to deck the halls with Molotov Cocktails is due to the heavy handed NEED to get the economy back on track with Christmas shopping. All I hear on the news is, "there are more shoppers this holiday season, but people are spending less at the checkout." Good. Maybe spending money that we can't afford to spend is what financially screwed the ENTIRE WORLD a little over a year ago. So, I say spend less this holiday season, in fact, spend nothing, write a letter, bake some bread, write a song, take a photo, make something everyday as part of Project 31 and then give them all away to your closest (or nearest) 25 friends. Or if you are going to spend money, at least spend it on booze. Which brings me back to my original point.
I got home from work and didn't go to sleep last night. Instead I went to The Green Mill, Chicago's most prestigious jazz club. I had a few drinks that, even on ice in the middle of winter, burned a bit on the way down. When I got home after some hot jazz and a cold walk, I realized I had nothing to eat. I grabbed some reusable shopping bags (let's save the world, people) and headed out to the overly colorful Jewel supermarket, which is where I met Peter, who didn't let me restock the Hamburger Helper. I love that little glove guy, especially when he's wearing a fake sketchy Italian mustache. I remembered to bring my sunglasses as it seems that modern day food packaging is meant to burn out your rods and cones while giving you eye cancer. There I was, cruising the isles with a great bourbon buzz, a steady hum in my ears lulling me off to sleep, an achy back and bloodshot eyes hid behind $4 cheap-o sunglasses over my normal glasses, deciding between diced canned tomatoes with green chillies or canned stewed halved tomatoes with jalapenos, all the while watching the salt of the Earth restock the Crispix, the imitation crab meat, the Hungry Man Salisbury Stake TV diners, the Pampers, the dog food, the eggs, the fabric softener, the Pepto, and everything that a 21st century digital man could want. I got a pineapple and some bologna.
“I’d rather you not.”
“Why not? I used to love this stuff.”
“Cause you are drunk and I don’t know you.”
“That's valid enough.”
This is an actual conversation that I had with Peter in the pasta isle last night. I think there is really only one good time to go shopping at a super market; 4am. And only one state of mind to be in; drunk.
On the weekends, I work for a big band that plays weddings, and corporate galas, and fundraisers, and other posh events. After a 10-12 hour day, I will get out of work between 2-3am and I usually head straight home to read a few pages of Greek mythology and crash in an exhausted blob of over stressed muscle mass while listening to the lullaby of my ears ringing from blasting September to old happy white men who dance out of time with huge smiles on their wrinkled faces. That ringing has become my friend as it seems to drown out a lot of the pointless conversations that I am forced to have with people who insist on talking about how wonderful the Christmas decorations are and how much they love Christmas. If you didn't know, I fucking hate Christmas. Here's last years edition of my Christmas Hate List. This year's main reason for wanting to deck the halls with Molotov Cocktails is due to the heavy handed NEED to get the economy back on track with Christmas shopping. All I hear on the news is, "there are more shoppers this holiday season, but people are spending less at the checkout." Good. Maybe spending money that we can't afford to spend is what financially screwed the ENTIRE WORLD a little over a year ago. So, I say spend less this holiday season, in fact, spend nothing, write a letter, bake some bread, write a song, take a photo, make something everyday as part of Project 31 and then give them all away to your closest (or nearest) 25 friends. Or if you are going to spend money, at least spend it on booze. Which brings me back to my original point.
I got home from work and didn't go to sleep last night. Instead I went to The Green Mill, Chicago's most prestigious jazz club. I had a few drinks that, even on ice in the middle of winter, burned a bit on the way down. When I got home after some hot jazz and a cold walk, I realized I had nothing to eat. I grabbed some reusable shopping bags (let's save the world, people) and headed out to the overly colorful Jewel supermarket, which is where I met Peter, who didn't let me restock the Hamburger Helper. I love that little glove guy, especially when he's wearing a fake sketchy Italian mustache. I remembered to bring my sunglasses as it seems that modern day food packaging is meant to burn out your rods and cones while giving you eye cancer. There I was, cruising the isles with a great bourbon buzz, a steady hum in my ears lulling me off to sleep, an achy back and bloodshot eyes hid behind $4 cheap-o sunglasses over my normal glasses, deciding between diced canned tomatoes with green chillies or canned stewed halved tomatoes with jalapenos, all the while watching the salt of the Earth restock the Crispix, the imitation crab meat, the Hungry Man Salisbury Stake TV diners, the Pampers, the dog food, the eggs, the fabric softener, the Pepto, and everything that a 21st century digital man could want. I got a pineapple and some bologna.
Monday, November 30, 2009
No Wonder I Can't Hear Anything - or - A List Of Sound
These are the bands that I’ve seen live. At least these are the ones I remember seeing. My first concert was DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. My latest was The Pixies. I wish I hadn’t ever seen Phish.
DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince
Technotronic
Public Enemy
Maceo Parker (x2)
Primus (x6)
Blink 182
Holy Fuck
John Spencers Blues Explosion
Toots and the Maytalls
Spin Doctors
Don Byron
Mr. Bungle
Man or Astroman
Mogwai
The Walkmen
The French Kicks
Modest Mouse (x3)
Tortoise (x2)
Trans Am
Screaming Trees
Medeski, Martin and Wood (x3)
The Physics of Meaning
311
Wilco
De La Soul
Cake
The Flaming Lips
Bela Fleck & the Flecktones (x3)
Fast Ball
Santana
Soul Aslyum
Screeming Trees
Blues Traveler (x2)
Beck
Ben Folds Five
Ben Harper
Neil Young with Crazy Horse
Soul Coughing
DeYarmond Edison
Clem Snide
Cold War Kids
Tapes N’ Tapes
Alman Brothers
Grateful Dead
Bob Dylan
Phish
Slint
Andrew Bird
They Might Be Giants
Inter Pol
Elvis Costello
Tony Bennett
Ted Leo & The Pharmacists
Artic Monkeys
Battles
Caribou
The Black Diamond Heavies ( > 8 )
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Devo
The Pixies
DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince
Technotronic
Public Enemy
Maceo Parker (x2)
Primus (x6)
Blink 182
Holy Fuck
John Spencers Blues Explosion
Toots and the Maytalls
Spin Doctors
Don Byron
Mr. Bungle
Man or Astroman
Mogwai
The Walkmen
The French Kicks
Modest Mouse (x3)
Tortoise (x2)
Trans Am
Screaming Trees
Medeski, Martin and Wood (x3)
The Physics of Meaning
311
Wilco
De La Soul
Cake
The Flaming Lips
Bela Fleck & the Flecktones (x3)
Fast Ball
Santana
Soul Aslyum
Screeming Trees
Blues Traveler (x2)
Beck
Ben Folds Five
Ben Harper
Neil Young with Crazy Horse
Soul Coughing
DeYarmond Edison
Clem Snide
Cold War Kids
Tapes N’ Tapes
Alman Brothers
Grateful Dead
Bob Dylan
Phish
Slint
Andrew Bird
They Might Be Giants
Inter Pol
Elvis Costello
Tony Bennett
Ted Leo & The Pharmacists
Artic Monkeys
Battles
Caribou
The Black Diamond Heavies ( > 8 )
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Devo
The Pixies
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Fill In The Gaps - or - You Can Have This Part, I'm Done Using It
It is never purely “out of the blue”. It is always inspired by someone else’s stories of mistakes made, lessons ignored, and consequences doled out by the bushel. That’s when I really start looking back at where I’ve been.
I think of my past. The endless winter hiking trips, a good mix of under and over prepared friends meeting at the base of a snow covered mountain range, seven days on snowshoes, climbing mountains during blizzards, dragging supplies on sleds up and down peak after peak, eating only Dinty Moore Beef Stew and loving every bite of it, drinking moonshine and piping hot lemonade on the tip top of White Owl, getting hypothermia at the very end of the trail, huddling around an almost empty sputtering camp stove at the end of a dark logging road helplessly waiting for someone’s girlfriend to drive up the impassible access road in the dead of winter in the endless dark of night to take us home. I remember being so cold that I lost all sensation in my body and stopped caring about the pain in my fingers and feet enough that it seemed like a good idea for my friends and I to start slapping and punching each other in the face to keep warm yet also to experience a punch to the face when our nerve endings and mind were so numb that you can’t feel anything and don’t care either. Eventually, a little black Jetta bobbed up the icy logging road and us boys stopped mindlessly beating each other and piled into the car. We were completely quite for the duration of the long ride home. The slow silent thaw of our stiff fingers by the heating vents sent ripples of pain from frostbite through our re-emerging minds as our bodies started reminding us what kind of pointless adventure we had just finished. We all deserved trophies.
I think of my past. The steamy summer days spent jumping off of bridges and cliffs into water that is way too shallow for any sane person to jump into from forty feet above. “You gotta keep to the right. Other wise you’re gonna break your legs on those rocks. Andrew Clack jumped to far left a month ago, and he dived, so now he’s got thirteen stitches in his head and can’t move his neck. He’s gotta heal up fast before the Marines ship him out in a few months to soak up bullets on the other side of the world. You know what, it’s best just to jump right through that little tree over there. You gotta jump from that ledge way above it. Make sure to jump out far enough to clear the cliff wall. Jake didn’t jump far enough and pin-wheeled off the cliff last year. He’s fine, but he won’t come out here anymore. Don’t worry about the tree, we’ve all jumped through it a bunch of times, it only scrapes you up a little. Not like those rocks on the left. Just don’t think about it when you’re up there or you’re gonna psyche yourself out and fuck it all up. Or we can go to Huntington Gorge if you like, but three more people died there last summer so now there are way too many concerned moms running around taking people’s beers away.”
I think about my past. I remember Hell. Hell was the name of the bomb shelter in the basement of my High School. At least that is what someone spray-painted on the walls down there. “HELL”. There was this little three-foot tall green metal door underneath one of the school stairwells that opened up to a steel rung ladder leading down to an unlit basement. There was a lock on the door, but it was never locked because if bombs were falling and you needed to get into the bomb shelter and the little door leading to the bomb shelter was locked, you’d be pretty pissed off. Even though it was unlocked, there was no handle on the door so you needed someone with fingernails to pry it open. Five minutes after classes started, the halls would be empty and we would meet up in Hell and smoke down. The ground was gravel, the air was stagnant and full of mildew and asbestos, and the ceilings were so low you couldn’t stand up. When we first found Hell, everyone brought flashlights to school. That eventually stopped. After a few trips to hell, you just knew where to go and when to duck. There was also a rule among us about flashlights, you never shined them in someone’s face when you were coming into Hell, because no one would know who you were and would assume that you were the Dean of Students coming down to bust everyone for getting stoned in the basement. We had set up a circle of old broken desks chairs down there, the kind where the seats are attached to little right-handed desks that are too small for a piece of full piece of paper to fit on. Some of the desks we found had ancient tags on them, Metallica or AC/DC or ZOHO or some senior’s initials from 1973 or “Amber Lucier is a SLUT!” scratched on them. My buddy J.G. once spent a whole day down there tripping his face off. You never brought someone down there that didn’t know about it. Hell was a secret that only the bad boys and girls knew about.
I think about my past. I remember Downtown Dave. Downtown Dave was a genius. That mother fucker hooked up his beat up old knock off Stratocaster guitar and a duct-taped shitty little Dictaphone microphone to a handheld radio transmitter powered by a car battery strapped to his back and would play for hours while walking around town. Any time we would see him, we would tune the car radio to 97.3, crack down the windows, crank up the volume, and listen to him jam. No shit. He was his own radio station. Everyone had it tuned to their one of their radio presets in their parents car. “There’s Davy! Switch it to WDAV, dude!” That’s what we called it when he was on the air, WDAV. He would play Dream On and Four Dead In Ohio and Tangled Up In Blue and Rockin’ In Your Free World and Add It Up and Sweet Child Of Mine and Born On A Bayou and Sweet Jane and any and every song that we could think up. Everyone knew him as Downtown Dave but no one ever called him that to his face. His parents lived in a big old beat up green van, which was always parked behind City Hall. His dad was named Big Bear and his mother only had a few teeth. Davy was always around, always invited, always welcome, and was never expected to chip in for beer money because, well, he didn’t have any money, and because he was always the best person to have around while drinking around a campfire. He had stringy black hair, dirty fingernails, crocked yellow teeth, and the world in the palm of his hand.
I think of my past. A fire burned my neighbor and best friend, JB’s house to the ground days before Christmas. He lived with me and my family for a year after that while his mom and step dad lived in a different house with his five year old sister and three year old brother, on top of a hill, miles away from where they used to live while the charred old house was ripped down and rebuilt with insurance money. He stayed in the room across from mine in the renovated attic of my folk house. It was basically the same room as there was no door between us, but we put up a curtain and some book shelves to make a pseudo wall between us; the room was the length and width of the whole house with a half a wall in the middle where the chimney was. JB had the east half, I had the west. He became my brother that winter. We went to school in the mornings together, came home late on weekends together, went to parties together, got drunk together, chased girls together, broke rules together, ran from cops together, and innocently smiled at our parents when we didn’t get caught. He once told me that his family wasn’t his any more. JB’s real dad left his mom before he was born. After raising him on her own, his mother had started a new family with his new dad and together they had made a new life with a new daughter and a new son. With the burned out house still visible out every window of my house, JB and I braved a long Vermont year together, side by side, as best friends, as brothers. And as that house was rebuilt, we had some of the best times of our lives. We had a serious falling out in 2001 as roommates in Boston and haven’t spoken a word to each other since.
I remember these things and feel good inside. I can crack a smile at the memories. I can think about my past and marvel at what an unrecognizable path it has lead me so far. All the way to this chair, this apartment, this job, this city, this life that I live now. Most of the time I see myself as a different person when I look back into my past, a young punk oblivious to the world outside of himself, full of spirit and spit, vigor and venom, chaos and compassion. Once in a while, in my head, it’s the right-now me, the thrity-one year old guy with the headband and the beard in the basement of the High School, or underneath Cook Down Bridge, it’s the immediate me with the job in the Greenhouse getting high with my old buddies, it’s the present tense version of me with my indelible and overwhelming yet totally justifiable fear of Hippopotamus jumping off rocks into frigid streams full of rocks and mud, it’s the $1800-a-month-in-bills me with my short salt-and-pepper hair and scratched-up designer eye glasses chopping down a ice coated tree on top of a mountain so that the wood stove would burn all night long. It’s me right now watching my neighbors house burn and telling him, “It’s okay. You’re gonna live with me now, and some how we’ll find some way to cram as much elation and madness into every second that we are alive.”
This path isn’t done yet and I smile when I wonder where it continues to lead me. I smile when I wonder how I’ll see myself now once I’ve gotten a little further down the line. I smile at the beautiful mystery that is forever unfolding before my eyes.
I think of my past. The endless winter hiking trips, a good mix of under and over prepared friends meeting at the base of a snow covered mountain range, seven days on snowshoes, climbing mountains during blizzards, dragging supplies on sleds up and down peak after peak, eating only Dinty Moore Beef Stew and loving every bite of it, drinking moonshine and piping hot lemonade on the tip top of White Owl, getting hypothermia at the very end of the trail, huddling around an almost empty sputtering camp stove at the end of a dark logging road helplessly waiting for someone’s girlfriend to drive up the impassible access road in the dead of winter in the endless dark of night to take us home. I remember being so cold that I lost all sensation in my body and stopped caring about the pain in my fingers and feet enough that it seemed like a good idea for my friends and I to start slapping and punching each other in the face to keep warm yet also to experience a punch to the face when our nerve endings and mind were so numb that you can’t feel anything and don’t care either. Eventually, a little black Jetta bobbed up the icy logging road and us boys stopped mindlessly beating each other and piled into the car. We were completely quite for the duration of the long ride home. The slow silent thaw of our stiff fingers by the heating vents sent ripples of pain from frostbite through our re-emerging minds as our bodies started reminding us what kind of pointless adventure we had just finished. We all deserved trophies.
I think of my past. The steamy summer days spent jumping off of bridges and cliffs into water that is way too shallow for any sane person to jump into from forty feet above. “You gotta keep to the right. Other wise you’re gonna break your legs on those rocks. Andrew Clack jumped to far left a month ago, and he dived, so now he’s got thirteen stitches in his head and can’t move his neck. He’s gotta heal up fast before the Marines ship him out in a few months to soak up bullets on the other side of the world. You know what, it’s best just to jump right through that little tree over there. You gotta jump from that ledge way above it. Make sure to jump out far enough to clear the cliff wall. Jake didn’t jump far enough and pin-wheeled off the cliff last year. He’s fine, but he won’t come out here anymore. Don’t worry about the tree, we’ve all jumped through it a bunch of times, it only scrapes you up a little. Not like those rocks on the left. Just don’t think about it when you’re up there or you’re gonna psyche yourself out and fuck it all up. Or we can go to Huntington Gorge if you like, but three more people died there last summer so now there are way too many concerned moms running around taking people’s beers away.”
I think about my past. I remember Hell. Hell was the name of the bomb shelter in the basement of my High School. At least that is what someone spray-painted on the walls down there. “HELL”. There was this little three-foot tall green metal door underneath one of the school stairwells that opened up to a steel rung ladder leading down to an unlit basement. There was a lock on the door, but it was never locked because if bombs were falling and you needed to get into the bomb shelter and the little door leading to the bomb shelter was locked, you’d be pretty pissed off. Even though it was unlocked, there was no handle on the door so you needed someone with fingernails to pry it open. Five minutes after classes started, the halls would be empty and we would meet up in Hell and smoke down. The ground was gravel, the air was stagnant and full of mildew and asbestos, and the ceilings were so low you couldn’t stand up. When we first found Hell, everyone brought flashlights to school. That eventually stopped. After a few trips to hell, you just knew where to go and when to duck. There was also a rule among us about flashlights, you never shined them in someone’s face when you were coming into Hell, because no one would know who you were and would assume that you were the Dean of Students coming down to bust everyone for getting stoned in the basement. We had set up a circle of old broken desks chairs down there, the kind where the seats are attached to little right-handed desks that are too small for a piece of full piece of paper to fit on. Some of the desks we found had ancient tags on them, Metallica or AC/DC or ZOHO or some senior’s initials from 1973 or “Amber Lucier is a SLUT!” scratched on them. My buddy J.G. once spent a whole day down there tripping his face off. You never brought someone down there that didn’t know about it. Hell was a secret that only the bad boys and girls knew about.
I think about my past. I remember Downtown Dave. Downtown Dave was a genius. That mother fucker hooked up his beat up old knock off Stratocaster guitar and a duct-taped shitty little Dictaphone microphone to a handheld radio transmitter powered by a car battery strapped to his back and would play for hours while walking around town. Any time we would see him, we would tune the car radio to 97.3, crack down the windows, crank up the volume, and listen to him jam. No shit. He was his own radio station. Everyone had it tuned to their one of their radio presets in their parents car. “There’s Davy! Switch it to WDAV, dude!” That’s what we called it when he was on the air, WDAV. He would play Dream On and Four Dead In Ohio and Tangled Up In Blue and Rockin’ In Your Free World and Add It Up and Sweet Child Of Mine and Born On A Bayou and Sweet Jane and any and every song that we could think up. Everyone knew him as Downtown Dave but no one ever called him that to his face. His parents lived in a big old beat up green van, which was always parked behind City Hall. His dad was named Big Bear and his mother only had a few teeth. Davy was always around, always invited, always welcome, and was never expected to chip in for beer money because, well, he didn’t have any money, and because he was always the best person to have around while drinking around a campfire. He had stringy black hair, dirty fingernails, crocked yellow teeth, and the world in the palm of his hand.
I think of my past. A fire burned my neighbor and best friend, JB’s house to the ground days before Christmas. He lived with me and my family for a year after that while his mom and step dad lived in a different house with his five year old sister and three year old brother, on top of a hill, miles away from where they used to live while the charred old house was ripped down and rebuilt with insurance money. He stayed in the room across from mine in the renovated attic of my folk house. It was basically the same room as there was no door between us, but we put up a curtain and some book shelves to make a pseudo wall between us; the room was the length and width of the whole house with a half a wall in the middle where the chimney was. JB had the east half, I had the west. He became my brother that winter. We went to school in the mornings together, came home late on weekends together, went to parties together, got drunk together, chased girls together, broke rules together, ran from cops together, and innocently smiled at our parents when we didn’t get caught. He once told me that his family wasn’t his any more. JB’s real dad left his mom before he was born. After raising him on her own, his mother had started a new family with his new dad and together they had made a new life with a new daughter and a new son. With the burned out house still visible out every window of my house, JB and I braved a long Vermont year together, side by side, as best friends, as brothers. And as that house was rebuilt, we had some of the best times of our lives. We had a serious falling out in 2001 as roommates in Boston and haven’t spoken a word to each other since.
I remember these things and feel good inside. I can crack a smile at the memories. I can think about my past and marvel at what an unrecognizable path it has lead me so far. All the way to this chair, this apartment, this job, this city, this life that I live now. Most of the time I see myself as a different person when I look back into my past, a young punk oblivious to the world outside of himself, full of spirit and spit, vigor and venom, chaos and compassion. Once in a while, in my head, it’s the right-now me, the thrity-one year old guy with the headband and the beard in the basement of the High School, or underneath Cook Down Bridge, it’s the immediate me with the job in the Greenhouse getting high with my old buddies, it’s the present tense version of me with my indelible and overwhelming yet totally justifiable fear of Hippopotamus jumping off rocks into frigid streams full of rocks and mud, it’s the $1800-a-month-in-bills me with my short salt-and-pepper hair and scratched-up designer eye glasses chopping down a ice coated tree on top of a mountain so that the wood stove would burn all night long. It’s me right now watching my neighbors house burn and telling him, “It’s okay. You’re gonna live with me now, and some how we’ll find some way to cram as much elation and madness into every second that we are alive.”
This path isn’t done yet and I smile when I wonder where it continues to lead me. I smile when I wonder how I’ll see myself now once I’ve gotten a little further down the line. I smile at the beautiful mystery that is forever unfolding before my eyes.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Pssst, Wanna See Something Cool? - or - Great, Now How The Hell Am I Gonna Beat That!
Do you see that big guy on the right of the President of the United States Of America? Yeah, the one with the green pants and the shiny gold name tag. That's my brother. When he sent me this photo, the quote that went along with it was, "I've been told when you have one of these, you show everyone." I can help that cause. My bro is bigger than Obama.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Where Is My...
Beautiful – Adj. Pleasing to the senses or mind ascetically.
Mystery – N – Something that is difficult or impossible to understand or explain.
Mystery – N – Something that is difficult or impossible to understand or explain.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
I'm Faceless - or - Hey Bro, David Byrne Is My Friend
A friend of mine, in an effort to get me to join facebook.com, sent a message to my brother, who she doesn't know at all, asking for advice on how to get me hooked into Facebook.
This is the message my brother sent back...
Subject: [Obsquatch] and his issues.
Good luck trying to get him on FB. I'm pretty sure he still thinks he's cool because he has David Byrne from Talking Heads as a 'Friend' on Friendster.
I canceled my friendster account last year, but I did have a few conversations with Mr. Byrne about the nature of the wind in his heart. Screw facebook, I prefer sunshine.
This photo of my brother and I was taken on the top of Bath Rock on day one of his rock climbing bachelor party. He took his closest friends from his two totally contrasting lifetimes (one which was lived in a basement popping pimples and playing D&D, and one which is currently being lived on top of glaciers, mountains, and rock faces) and spent a week in the middle of Rock City, Idaho (read: the most intense rock climbing park this side of the Himalayas, but seriously the middle of nowhere). We climbed for three days and drank over 300 cans of beer. I love this guy more than I could ever love facebook.
This is the message my brother sent back...
Subject: [Obsquatch] and his issues.
Good luck trying to get him on FB. I'm pretty sure he still thinks he's cool because he has David Byrne from Talking Heads as a 'Friend' on Friendster.
I canceled my friendster account last year, but I did have a few conversations with Mr. Byrne about the nature of the wind in his heart. Screw facebook, I prefer sunshine.
This photo of my brother and I was taken on the top of Bath Rock on day one of his rock climbing bachelor party. He took his closest friends from his two totally contrasting lifetimes (one which was lived in a basement popping pimples and playing D&D, and one which is currently being lived on top of glaciers, mountains, and rock faces) and spent a week in the middle of Rock City, Idaho (read: the most intense rock climbing park this side of the Himalayas, but seriously the middle of nowhere). We climbed for three days and drank over 300 cans of beer. I love this guy more than I could ever love facebook.
Monday, November 09, 2009
Button Button - or - Maize And Ravens
There was this game I used to play as a child called Button Button. I'm pretty sure that I made it up, but I also thought that I invented breathing though your nose, so I might be mistaken about being Button Button's inventor. It was easy enough to play, and everyone was good at it because there is only one rule. When someone yells "Button Button!" you have to press every button, twist every knob, and change the settings on anything that has changeable settings on it within eyesight. I'd play this game by myself while waiting in the car for my folks to drive me somewhere. When they would start the car, they would get a dusty blast from the car vents being set to full, the blinkers would start flashing, the windshield wipers would start thrashing around, the radio would blast out deafening static from some AM station, and I would laugh my little butt off.
My friends and I would play in the elevators of office buildings. Right as we were getting off a crowded elevator, someone would yell "Button Button!" and who ever was closest to the panel would hit the call button for every floor and then dart out the elevator and down the hallway, much to the chagrin of the businessmen and women who were already pissed for having to share an elevator with the likes of me and my punkass friends and who would now have to stop at every floor in the building on the way back to their dreary lives working in a crowded and sterile State Office building.
To this day, I play Button Button when I can't figure out how to turn on a friends stereo system. It never quite has the outcome I originally intend when I pick up the remote, but it is definitely is worth it when somehow the TV pops on and, lo and behold, midget porn. Who doesn't love midget porn?
Try it someday (Button Button, not midget porn. Screw it, try midget porn also. Why not?). Button Button is a lot more fun than you might think, especially with all the buttons that are around us these days.
The reason I bring up Button Button is because there are a lot of buttons on the internet, many of which also lead to midget porn. Withing seconds of playing Button Button online, you can go from a list of signers of the Constitution, to a shop that sells some of the crassest tee-shirts I've ever seen. If you can't see the connection betwixt these two sites, then you need to broaden your e-horizons. I'm sure every one of our founding fathers would have looked great in a "Thousands of my potential children died on your daughters face last night" shirt. If that isn't human progress, than I don't know what is.
I pressed a button yesterday. I pressed a button at the top of this screen right here. A button I've never pressed before. I pressed the "Next Blog" button and found this site. It's some college student's photography page. His name is Swikar Patel. This is my favorite photo of his.
He is good, but not nearly as good as my buddy at IDMphotography.com. Here's a link to his blog, which is a constant stop my online Button Button game.
My friends and I would play in the elevators of office buildings. Right as we were getting off a crowded elevator, someone would yell "Button Button!" and who ever was closest to the panel would hit the call button for every floor and then dart out the elevator and down the hallway, much to the chagrin of the businessmen and women who were already pissed for having to share an elevator with the likes of me and my punkass friends and who would now have to stop at every floor in the building on the way back to their dreary lives working in a crowded and sterile State Office building.
To this day, I play Button Button when I can't figure out how to turn on a friends stereo system. It never quite has the outcome I originally intend when I pick up the remote, but it is definitely is worth it when somehow the TV pops on and, lo and behold, midget porn. Who doesn't love midget porn?
Try it someday (Button Button, not midget porn. Screw it, try midget porn also. Why not?). Button Button is a lot more fun than you might think, especially with all the buttons that are around us these days.
The reason I bring up Button Button is because there are a lot of buttons on the internet, many of which also lead to midget porn. Withing seconds of playing Button Button online, you can go from a list of signers of the Constitution, to a shop that sells some of the crassest tee-shirts I've ever seen. If you can't see the connection betwixt these two sites, then you need to broaden your e-horizons. I'm sure every one of our founding fathers would have looked great in a "Thousands of my potential children died on your daughters face last night" shirt. If that isn't human progress, than I don't know what is.
I pressed a button yesterday. I pressed a button at the top of this screen right here. A button I've never pressed before. I pressed the "Next Blog" button and found this site. It's some college student's photography page. His name is Swikar Patel. This is my favorite photo of his.
He is good, but not nearly as good as my buddy at IDMphotography.com. Here's a link to his blog, which is a constant stop my online Button Button game.
Saturday, November 07, 2009
Oh Crap - or - What Is The Color Of Nonsurprise
I just found out that I am going to be laid off from the Greenhouse after the Christmas rush is over. That means that I have to stop spending money, because I'm effectively going to stop making money in a month and a half. The Greenhouse is not my main source of income, running weddings for rich people is my main source of income, but rich people don't want to get married in the middle of winter in Chicago. If rich people want to get married in the middle of winter, they go to where it isn't winter, you know, the other side of the world, and get married in flip flops and bikinis. You can't wear flip flops in February in Chicago.
On a totally different note, the event I ran tonight was a black tie dance party for... yep, you guessed it. Rich people. As we were setting up, the manager of the facility said to us, "There is a noise ordinance here and you have to keep the volume below one thousand decibels." My assistant and I did the coffee spit take. I'll explain why for those of you who are not audiophiles, gear-heads, or sound techs like me (read basement dwelling losers whose only lines of communication are with fellow sound techies utilizing vernacular strictly referring to catalog numbers of high end discontinued microphones, preamps, and audio rack gear). A decibel is a logarithmic scale of loudness. A difference of 1 decibel is the minimum perceptible change in volume; a change of 10 decibels is a doubling of the volume. The average face melting rock concert is about 120 db. The human threshold for pain is at 130 db. 1000 db is 870 times louder than that threshold. My assistant turned to me and said, "That is louder than the sun."
Louder than the sun.
It sparked a big debate betwixt us over whether the sun generates sound. Here are the two camps.
My assistant said yes. The sun is made up of gases, mostly hydrogen and helium, which in their unexcited state (not on fire) both allow for rapid compressions and expansions of the gas particles, or sound waves, to transmit "audio" from one location to the next. The sound of hydrogen being turned into helium within the sun has a similar sound to millions and millions of Nuclear warheads going off inside your next door neighbors studio apartment with paper thin walls. Therefor, the sun is loud. Damn loud.
I said no. Any hydrogen within the sun that is being transformed into helium does so at millions of degrees Fahrenheit, and no material known within the universe can withstand that heat. In order for sound to exist, a surface must sympathetically vibrate with the compressions and expansions of the gas particles. There is no substance that can tolerate the conditions within the sun long enough to sympathetically respond to the sound waves being emitted by the separation of the electrons from their respective particles of a hydrogen. Further more, if the perceiving object, or the "sun ear" to coin a term, is not withing the flaming gas cloud that is the sun, then it is in the vacuum of space, which is totally silent due to the lace of medium for sound waves. Therefor, the sun is silent. Totally silent.
My assistant then asked, "So if a tree falls in the woods and there is no one to hear it, does it make a sound?"
I reply with, "Yes it does. But if a tree falls into the sun and someone IS there to hear it, I hope that that someone is you and your are instantly turned to sun-chared-assistant-sound-man dust. Then I hope that the dust-you will be pissed because you started this whole stupid argument."
"Whatever, I still think that being louder than the sun is bad ass."
"Agreed, let's start a band and name it that."
"Fuck yeah."
So, does anyone want to sublet my apartment in Jan and Feb? I can tell my neighbor with the H-bombs to keep it down.
On a totally different note, the event I ran tonight was a black tie dance party for... yep, you guessed it. Rich people. As we were setting up, the manager of the facility said to us, "There is a noise ordinance here and you have to keep the volume below one thousand decibels." My assistant and I did the coffee spit take. I'll explain why for those of you who are not audiophiles, gear-heads, or sound techs like me (read basement dwelling losers whose only lines of communication are with fellow sound techies utilizing vernacular strictly referring to catalog numbers of high end discontinued microphones, preamps, and audio rack gear). A decibel is a logarithmic scale of loudness. A difference of 1 decibel is the minimum perceptible change in volume; a change of 10 decibels is a doubling of the volume. The average face melting rock concert is about 120 db. The human threshold for pain is at 130 db. 1000 db is 870 times louder than that threshold. My assistant turned to me and said, "That is louder than the sun."
Louder than the sun.
It sparked a big debate betwixt us over whether the sun generates sound. Here are the two camps.
My assistant said yes. The sun is made up of gases, mostly hydrogen and helium, which in their unexcited state (not on fire) both allow for rapid compressions and expansions of the gas particles, or sound waves, to transmit "audio" from one location to the next. The sound of hydrogen being turned into helium within the sun has a similar sound to millions and millions of Nuclear warheads going off inside your next door neighbors studio apartment with paper thin walls. Therefor, the sun is loud. Damn loud.
I said no. Any hydrogen within the sun that is being transformed into helium does so at millions of degrees Fahrenheit, and no material known within the universe can withstand that heat. In order for sound to exist, a surface must sympathetically vibrate with the compressions and expansions of the gas particles. There is no substance that can tolerate the conditions within the sun long enough to sympathetically respond to the sound waves being emitted by the separation of the electrons from their respective particles of a hydrogen. Further more, if the perceiving object, or the "sun ear" to coin a term, is not withing the flaming gas cloud that is the sun, then it is in the vacuum of space, which is totally silent due to the lace of medium for sound waves. Therefor, the sun is silent. Totally silent.
My assistant then asked, "So if a tree falls in the woods and there is no one to hear it, does it make a sound?"
I reply with, "Yes it does. But if a tree falls into the sun and someone IS there to hear it, I hope that that someone is you and your are instantly turned to sun-chared-assistant-sound-man dust. Then I hope that the dust-you will be pissed because you started this whole stupid argument."
"Whatever, I still think that being louder than the sun is bad ass."
"Agreed, let's start a band and name it that."
"Fuck yeah."
So, does anyone want to sublet my apartment in Jan and Feb? I can tell my neighbor with the H-bombs to keep it down.
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
Halloween - or - How The Fuck Did I End Up There?
I almost got in a fight with a guy dressed as Patrick Sweazy dressed as Ronald Reagan because I complimented him on implementing trickle-down-economics and deepening the proverbial moats betwixt those with money and those without. The guy in the mask told me to fuck off, so I told him to get a drink and chill fuck out. Maybe I told him a little to strongly cause his buddies had to hold him back. The one thing I learned was that when you wear a Speedo Track Suit, everyone wants their picture taken with you.
I went to three parties, but by the end of the night, ended up with hanging out with these jokers...
... at a gay bar.
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