Ben is Turning on the People: Pt 1

But don't get me wrong, it is a new and palpable joy in my life,  this radio show. It takes a lot of too-detailed planning, atleast one and 2/3rd extra nights of my week. Nevermind all the wasted professional hours when I should be Normalizing Cubes or deciphering a sales manager's hamfisted email. Fuck that, I'm spending 10-11:30 scraping the internet for Negazione.

The show allows me to dweeb excessively with Justin and also forces me to engage alternately weird and isolating segments of punk music. A lot of the "hey we gotta play this new" songs make me nodshrug, but on occasion I'll find some really inspiring gold.

The trips back to STL don't help my time crunch, for example this weekend I'm going to Chicago for birthday partying.  These are the weeks where we pick an easy topic and phone it in. I've started marking the passage of time in weeks now. It's always how many days until monday.

I'm half way through a new project with a few people I've never worked with before, and one person who's never been in any band before, but has all the right ideas. I am tickled. Atop this I've been squinting at playing in 2 cover bands for this years PUNK ROCK HALLOWEEN, which has thankfully been postponed to the end of November.

And I have new recording commitments, which I really love but without clear definition up front, can be a black hole from which light and time find no escape.

This all comes down to a bit of talk I had with the sage Brooke Hunt this weekend, I was yakking about all of this and she punctuated our conversation with "You're really a project person aren't you?"

"Yeah, and it makes me a zombie."

Nothing left to chance. I feel very strange having 3 hours alone, unplanned. Even if I'm sitting around listening to records, that's LISTENING TIME (7-9). Or just down at the studio fucking around, that's STUDIO TIME (8-10:30). This manner of thinking leaves no reserves for when the very real and frightening happens.

Curiously, the only time that hyper-schedule isn't in play, is when I'm with friends. Then, it's always fuck it. That timetable-o-death only happens when I'm alone.

This is why people eat peyote or become Promise Keepers, to shock the system from a long failed pattern. It's not that I'm doing things I don't love, it's that I'm completely impatient with myself. It's hard to catch that slip, when I get overextended and itchy. Some motherfuckers go their whole life like this, tiny intrepid geniuses who do great things and become isolated from thems they's doing for.

Nope. No thanks.

I can't get no I can't get no

Every monday night, I'm down at radio station to do the show at 1 AM. I then am tasked to play syndicated liberal crap from 2-5. Usually it's more like 2-6, as the elderly guy who replaces me, Groovy Grant, never shows up at 5 AM. Last week he didn't show up at all. I was there until 8:30. I'm supposed to be at work at 8 AM.

So the mission has been to be at home asleep on Mondays at 8 PM, set my alarm for midnight. This has proven impossible to force.

I've tried sitting in bed and reading, nope, I just keep reading.

I've tried an enormous burrito while slamming 3 beers in a half hour.

I've tried psyching myself into sleepyness, which means I try to slow my ambitions at about 4pm. I just get depressed that I can't see friends or be down at the studio. And then my downhill bummer roll starts and now I'm just awake, lonely, and racked with outdated guilt.

After the show I try to sleep on the floor, under the mixer, which the FCC considers "illegal". I snag maybe 2 half hour winks.

These tuesdays, I'm zonked but great, because I made it through another cloistering monday night.

I can't do this much longer. The plan is to make it through the fundraiser (2 weeks away), after which I'll make my appeal for a better slot. Failing that, I'll threaten to quit because my job can't take me showing up late and half awake. There's no way I'd actually quit, I love it too much, and too many nice strangers love it too. But once a week I turn psychotic.

If you can read this, gimmie some advice.